


Ninia

by stillscape



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, M/M, Relationship Tags To Be Updated, Slow Burn, Soulmates, count the tropes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2020-05-13 00:45:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 54,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19240420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: They said the most closely connected soulmates met because they were drawn to each other, like moths to a flame. It didn’t matter how far apart you lived; if you were truly meant to be with someone, you would find your way to that person—and the more spectacular your meeting, the better. You would find your person, and you would know.But Jughead? Jughead didn’t have those urges.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sullypants for the moodboard and encouragement, and to village-skeptic, singsongsung, and heartunsettledsoul for yelling at me until this became a thing.

  
  
  
  


_Every day I wake up and it's Sunday_  
_Whatever's on my mind won't go away_  
_The radio is playing all the usual_  
_And what's a wonderwall anyway?_  
\- Travis, "Writing to Reach You"

  
  
  
  


They said the most closely connected soulmates met because they were drawn to each other, like moths to a flame. It didn’t matter how far apart you lived; if you were truly meant to be with someone, you would find your way to that person—and the more spectacular your meeting, the better. You would find your person, and you would know. 

You’d be struck with the urge to turn down a side street you’d never driven down before, and even though you weren’t usually the kind of person to pull over and help a stranger in need, when you saw the vintage red convertible with the flat tire, you’d think, _today is a good day to be a good Samaritan._ (That was how Jughead’s friend Toni had met Cheryl.) 

You’d be struck with the urge to go to California, and even though you were fifteen years old and had no income other than babysitting change, even though your family was only slightly less poor than dirt and couldn’t afford a plane ticket, let alone the tuition, you’d apply to an intensive summer science program anyway, somehow knowing that a full scholarship, travel included, would be granted to you. You’d step off the plane in San Francisco alone, shouldering your dad’s old Army rucksack, and find your ride to the college campus. Struggling to buckle your seatbelt in the third row of an old Ford Econoline, you’d brush fingers with a boy struggling to buckle his seatbelt. As soon as your skin touched, even before you looked into his eyes, you would _know_. (That was how Jughead’s sister Jellybean had met Pranav.) 

But Jughead? Jughead didn’t have those urges. Oh, he’d thought he might, once upon a time, when he’d been an idealistic teenager convinced of his own importance in the world. He had followed nearly every urge he’d ever gotten. His urges led him to libraries and his small town’s ageless diner and, eventually, his dad’s gang; they led him away from football games and school dances and, eventually, his dad’s gang. 

All the while, he’d imagined that the steps he was taking would lead him to the person Fate had chosen just for him. When that person did not materialize in high school, he took the most rational approach to the situation. Most people didn’t meet their soulmates until slightly later on, so there was no need to worry. Twenty-two was the average reported age, which meant that in reality it was probably slightly older, because no one was so likely to announce that they’d found their soulmate as a teenager in the first bloom of a crush. 

(Archie claimed to find four soulmates before they even reached senior year of high school.) 

Jughead found that he had the urge to apply to colleges, so he did. Once enrolled, he had the urge to apply for a part-time job at his favorite coffee shop, so he did that too. 

He slept with two girls in the course of four years, but did not imagine for a moment that either of them was the person Fate had chosen for him. He took a handful of culinary arts classes, but wasn’t foolish enough to think Fate had anything to do with that—he simply wanted to know how to feed himself, and bake his own cookies. 

A few months after graduation, when his best friend Archie announced his intention to move to Chicago to pursue a music career (disadvantage: not New York or Los Angeles; advantage: he could rent the downstairs apartment in his mom’s brownstone at an extremely reasonable rate), Jughead found that despite having never so much as set foot in the Windy City before, he now desperately needed to live there. After all, he could work on his novel anywhere. And, after all, the downstairs apartment was a two-bedroom. 

His twenty-second birthday came and went, and then his twenty-third, and still, no soulmate materialized. 

He’d been scrimping and saving since he was twelve years old, and once in Chicago, he took care to play his cards right. Only a few years after moving, with the help of a startup loan and a not-insignificant investment from Mary Andrews, he was the proud owner of a coffee shop of his very own. Or—co-owner with Archie, technically, whose name Mary put on the paperwork in lieu of her own. But no one ever mistook which one of them was in charge. 

The coffee shop stood at the west edge of Andersonville, in a building that would have been demolished long ago were it not for the plaque denoting it historically significant. The space was a disaster, but Jughead liked old things, and something about the building spoke to him. His low-ball rental offer was accepted. His permits went through without a hitch. His dad and Archie’s dad, their once-ruined friendship long since rebuilt, had traveled out to Chicago to help get things going. All four men poured in sweat equity while Jughead also poured them all coffee. 

The night before opening, Jughead stayed after his dad and Archie and Fred had gone back to the brownstone. He stood on the sidewalk in his jeans and old white tank top, skin sticky in the early summer humidity, and drank in the logo: a wisp of steam forming a three-pronged crown over a mug that was modeled on the mugs from Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe back in Riverdale. An artist had been hired to translate Jughead’s conceptual doodle into reality—the sign needed to look professional, after all—but Jughead had insisted on doing the lettering himself. He’d done it with a can of spray paint, graffiti-style, as he’d once proclaimed his existence to a drive-in movie theater destined for destruction. 

_Ninia_ , read the letters. 

So yes, Jughead Jones had urges. They had never once led him astray. 

But as he lay in bed that night, nicely exhausted but too hyped up about tomorrow’s grand opening to sleep (it was also possible that he’d made himself a few too many sample pour-overs today), his brain put forth a solid, incontrovertible fact. 

His urges had never once led him to another person. Or, at least, they had never once led him to the _right_ person. 

It was possible, Jughead thought, that his soulmate was coffee. 

  
  
  
  


Archie Andrews was the kind of person who voluntarily woke up at five in the morning to go running, which was but one of the many ways Jughead knew that despite what his own mother believed, Archie Andrews was not his soulmate.

The parade of women was another. There were two main schools of thought when it came to sex with people who weren’t your soulmate, and Archie belonged to the one that said since one never knew when one’s soulmate would reveal themself, one might as well have some fun and get some practice in, so as to be good and ready when the soulmate appeared. 

Intellectually, Jughead agreed with this school of thought. He understood how, in theory, casual sex could be fun. Practically, things did not work out that way for him. He wasn’t a virgin, but sleeping with those two girls in college confirmed what he’d already suspected about himself: he was one of those people who neither wanted to nor could disentangle physical and emotional intimacy. And as the only people with whom he ever felt a true emotional connection were members of his own family, Archie’s parents, and Archie himself, well…

  
  
  
  


It happened during their senior year of high school. Their friendship had been torn for almost a year, since the school district finally caught on to the Jones’ fudged northside address and Jughead was subsequently forced to transfer. Once relegated to the wrong side of the tracks, he got angrier than usual; he quit writing for a few months; he increased the percentage of black in his wardrobe and joined the Serpents. But then Southside High shut down, and Jughead found himself right back at Riverside High, slowly stitching his former life back together. 

And _then_ his father was arrested. 

This wasn’t F.P.’s first arrest, but it was the first time he failed to manage to slither his way out of trouble. A six-month jail sentence was handed down, and with Gladys and J.B. long since gone, Jughead found himself effectively homeless. 

Sighing with distaste at the green serpent inked into Jughead’s shoulder, Fred Andrews nevertheless put his John Hancock on the appropriate paperwork, becoming Jughead’s temporary legal guardian. 

The air mattress on the floor was just like it always had been. The old television and XBox were just as they always had been. And the way Archie sat on the edge of his bed, looking earnestly at Jughead, was just like it always had been. 

Until, suddenly, it wasn’t at all.

  
  
  
  


“I don’t know, Jughead,” Archie said worriedly, averting his gaze from Jughead’s bare chest as both boys scrambled to dress themselves before Fred got home and noticed anything amiss. “I mean—it was fine. I... I liked the way it felt, even. The way _you_ felt. And you know I love you. But something wasn’t... you felt it too, right? That something was—I don’t know. Off.” 

“We love each other like brothers,” Jughead replied drily. 

“Right.”

“So essentially, we’ve just committed incest.” He pulled his hat firmly over his ears before any more insecurities or defense mechanisms could leak out, and only then did he reach for the undershirt that had somehow found its way under Archie’s bed.

Archie sputtered into laughter, which was soon interrupted by one of those visibly arriving thoughts that made his face go completely solemn. He stood up, pants on but still shirtless, and proclaimed, “It was just making out and hand stuff. I don’t think that even counts as _sex_. Not really.” 

“Whether or not it does, it’s close enough to the neighborhood that I’m still starving afterwards.” With a hesitance he was reluctant to admit he felt, even to himself, he said, “Pop’s?” 

In lieu of an answer, Archie buckled his belt and then nudged Jughead in the ribs. “We’re okay, Jug, aren’t we? This doesn’t change anything?” 

The relief that washed over Jughead at knowing Archie felt the same way he did—was just as confused as he was, and just as afraid to screw up their newly rekindled friendship—felt like stepping into a hot shower after hours in the freezing snow. He ran a hand over the snake tattoo on his bicep, remembering the feeling of Archie’s fingers there only minutes ago. In that moment, Jughead knew that Archie Andrews was not his soulmate. 

All seemed right with the world.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Jughead confirmed. 

They went to Pop’s, and if their conversation was a bit more awkward, more stilted than usual, Jughead still felt confident enough at meal’s end to make a bad joke about which one of them ought to pick up the check. 

Archie chuckled. 

He also picked up the check. 

  
  
  
  


Jughead Jones was _not_ the kind of person who woke up voluntarily at five in the morning to go running. He was not the kind of person who woke up voluntarily at five in the morning for any reason at all, save one—to open the doors of Ninia, which he insisted on doing himself. 

In fact, he had to wake up at _four_ in the morning, determined as he was to make at least some of the pastries in-house and fresh each day. Bagels, croissants, and ordinary bread were being brought in from a local bakery, but he hadn’t spent years perfecting his cheese danishes or his strawberry jam tarts for nothing. _All_ of the oversized cookies, from the classic chocolate chip to the sea salt snickerdoodles and the dreadfully hipster vegan quinoa-oatmeal raisin, would be his and his alone. 

(And if there were any vegan quinoa-oatmeal raisins left at the end of the day, well, he simply would not eat them. Even Jughead had his limits.) 

There would be three knocks on the back door every morning while Jughead got the baking underway. The first was Archie, who of course had a key, but claimed it didn’t fit comfortably in his running shorts. 

While Archie freshened up from his run in the employees-only bathroom, the second person would knock: Ethel Muggs.

“Odd she brings everything herself,” Jughead said to Archie one morning, two weeks into their endeavor, after Ethel finally left. 

Ethel was their bread supplier. Since she owned the bakery, Jughead had thought she would hire someone to do the deliveries. But no, there Ethel was every morning with her perfect ringlet curls and her Peter Pan collars, smiling cheerfully as she handed over a dozen loaves of brioche and five dozen bagels. Archie, being Archie, had offered her a latte on the very first day, and Jughead wished he’d found a way to prevent Archie from doing so. Now Ethel was sitting at the espresso bar every morning, crossing her legs at the ankles to show off her apparently endless collection of weird frilly ankle socks and patent leather Mary Janes while she took her time sipping Archie’s creations. At the very least, Jughead supposed, it was an opportunity for Archie to practice latte art, at which he was very bad. 

This morning, Ethel had asked for Jughead’s opinion on a new muffin recipe she was trying out. “Spirulina and carrot,” she said, which did _not_ prepare Jughead for biting straight into a huge chunk of crystallized ginger and nearly gagging. 

Archie shot Jughead the kind of look that Jughead typically shot Archie. 

“Jug,” Archie said patiently, “she _likes_ you.” 

Although he was all too aware that he was a twenty-six-year-old man who wore a decades-old hat as a security blanket every single day, Jughead still could not imagine foreplay that involved peeling _frilly ankle socks_ off a grown woman. 

There was a third knock on the back door. That, Jughead knew, would be Sweet Pea, one of the baristas. 

“She dresses like a five-year-old,” Jughead grumbled, as he opened the door. 

“Who does?” Sweet Pea demanded. 

Archie grinned. “The bread supplier. She might be Jughead’s soulmate.” 

“She is _not_ my soulmate, Arch.” 

Sweet Pea grinned back at Archie, then noticed the spirulina and carrot muffin. Apparently unbothered that a bite was already missing, he shoved the entire rest of the muffin into his mouth at once. 

His eyes bulged wide, making Jughead wonder if he was going to have to use that Heimlich maneuver training. But then Sweet Pea swallowed hard and grinned.

“Fuck,” he said. “That’s delicious.” 

  
  
  
  


One month after opening, Archie’s biggest contribution to Ninia’s success had proven to be not the open mic night he insisted on hosting every Friday, but the blatant rip-off of Chatty Wednesdays from _Fleabag_. Archie hadn’t even watched the show himself; he’d simply wandered into the living room while Jughead had it on, and said, “Hey, we should do that!” 

After a considerable argument, Jughead agreed to try out Chatty Wednesdays, on three conditions. The first was that Archie would be responsible for the bulk of the customer interaction. (If there was one thing about the coffee shop game that Jughead would never learn to like, it was the customer service aspects.) The second was that the requirement to chat would only apply in the afternoons; Jughead wasn’t sure he could take a whole day of talkative customers. And the third was that Chatty Wednesdays would only take over half the shop. They couldn’t afford to lose their “park here for two hours with a laptop” regulars. 

To Jughead’s immense surprise, Chatty Wednesdays took off. Only a few people showed up to the first one; by the second, half the shop was full; by the third, it was nearly as loud as his dad’s old bar used to get on Saturday nights. He’d had to give up on the idea that they’d be able to keep a space open for the laptop-parkers. They were down to a single table for that. 

He knew, now, to make sure the bathrooms were fully stocked _before_ Chatty Wednesdays started up. 

“Hey, Arch,” he called, and Archie’s familiar red hair popped up from behind the counter. “Can you hold down the fort on your own for a bit? We’re low on toilet paper. I’m gonna go pick up some extra.” 

Archie nodded. “No problem. Fangs should be here soon, anyway, right?” 

“Should be,” Jughead confirmed, before grabbing his jacket and leaving through the back door. 

In the alley, he found Fangs just arriving on his motorcycle. They nodded hello, and Jughead allowed himself to feel a twinge of self-satisfaction. Remembering how difficult it had been for his dad to find legitimate work after getting out of prison, he’d been determined to hire at least a couple of ex-cons. Archie remained somewhat skeptical of this plan, but Sweet Pea and Fangs were proving to be devoted, hard-working, loyal employees so far. Fangs had a surprisingly good touch with the espresso machine. 

Plus, there were other factors, ones which Jughead had not considered but were apparently working out in their favor anyway. Hanging in the hallway to the restroom was a framed review of Ninia from a recent issue of the local indie weekly, one he’d just walked past and now stared at in his mind’s eye as he walked to the drug store. 

The review featured a picture of the four of them standing behind the espresso bar and the headline “The North Side’s _Hottest_ New Coffee Shop,” with the subsequent article barely mentioning beverages, food, general atmosphere, or service in favor of numerous veiled references to the attractiveness of their baristas. Jughead found the review embarrassing, especially as he thought he looked both particularly exhausted and particularly grumpy in the photo. Archie didn’t understand what the big deal was. Fangs and Sweet Pea both thought it was hilarious.

Business had increased, and for the first time, Jughead noticed patrons simply watching the espresso bar as they drank, rather than mucking around on their phones.

Any business was good business, he supposed, and he was trying not to be cranky about it. But he didn’t want Ninia to be known for hot baristas. He hadn’t busted his ass for years only to succeed on the strength of Archie’s biceps. 

He entered the drug store, grabbed a basket, and headed straight for the women’s sanitary products. There were more choices than he’d been expecting—not just pads and tampons, but different weights of each, and different materials? Though he wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the world of menstrual products (he did have a little sister, after all), Jelly was already in Toledo by the time she started needing such things. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever needed to pick any out. 

Two boxes of organic unbleached cotton tampons with biodegradable applicators spoke to him. They were more expensive than most of the other options, but they were, he justified, most in line with Ninia’s general ethos. 

Only when he’d gotten to the end of the checkout line did Jughead remember that he had not come to the drugstore for tampons. He had come for toilet paper. 

He abandoned the line, threw a few rolls of toilet paper in his basket, and then headed back to the tampon aisle, intending to put the boxes back on the shelf. 

He couldn’t make himself do it. 

“You don’t _need_ tampons,” he said out loud, drawing a funny look from an old lady who was examining packages of emery boards. 

But he did. He absolutely, positively, without question _needed_ to buy these tampons. 

Back at Ninia, he added spare rolls of toilet paper to both their single-stall, gender-neutral restrooms. Then he grabbed a couple of spare mugs and arranged little tampon bouquets on the backs of the toilets. 

Footsteps squeaked on the floor behind him, and he turned around to see Fangs in the bathroom doorway with a confused look on his face. 

“Those are just going to get stolen,” he said. “The tampons _and_ the mugs.” 

Jughead knew Fangs was almost certainly correct, but he didn’t care. The tampons needed to stay. 

“Then we’ll replace them.” 

Fangs shrugged, as if to say _it’ll be your loss_. 

  
  
  
  


Halfway through the afternoon, with the coffee shop mostly full and Archie leading a singalong Paul Simon medley, a blonde woman came through the door, staggering under the weight of an enormous laptop bag and even bigger backpack. She was steady in her low wedge heels, her ponytail and makeup were flawless despite the July humidity, and her white linen suit was pristine. Despite the veneer of perfection, Jughead immediately got the impression that this woman was both extremely stressed out _and_ extremely good at hiding that fact. 

“Is there a key or a code to your restroom?” she asked, once she’d gotten to the counter. “I promise I’ll order something after, I just—you know.” 

Nodding, Jughead reached for one of the keys, attached to a novelty oversized magnifying glass, and handed it to her with a simple, “No problem.” 

“Thanks,” she said, flashing him a small, grateful, and somehow brilliant smile. 

“A man walks down the street,” came Archie’s voice, rising over the general din. “It’s a street in a strange world, maybe it’s the Third World, maybe it’s his first time around…” 

Jughead’s feet carried him to the selection of loose-leaf tea. It was hot outside, but perhaps… well, the air conditioning was on, so perhaps if she intended to stay for a bit…

He looked around at Archie and the cheerfully singing crowd, and around again at the hallway. One of the perks of being in an older building was the interesting architecture, the details of which they’d tried to keep in the renovation; the hallway to the restrooms was framed with a large, ornate arch whose carvings suggested feathers. After a fresh coat of bright white paint, it contrasted nicely with the dark exposed brick of the back wall. 

The woman stood there now, examining the side carving, fingers tracing lightly over the featherlike shapes. Then her revery broke, and she spun around. 

She seemed more relaxed than she had when she entered the coffee shop, but not by much. “Thanks,” she said. “Okay. What’s good here?” 

“Well, I’m strictly a black coffee guy myself, but…” He trailed off when the woman shook her head. 

“It’s too late in the afternoon for caffeine for me.”

Jughead gestured back at the apothecary jars of loose-leaf. “Herbal tea?” 

“That would be perfect.” She began scanning the labels. “Um…” 

“I can do a blend,” Jughead offered. “Chamomile and lavender is very popular.” 

“That sounds good,” she said. 

“Sugar? We just got these new lavender-infused raw sugar cubes in.” Jughead thought they were unbearably pretentious, even for an indie coffee shop, but they smelled amazing nevertheless. He opened the jar and held it out to let the woman have a sniff. 

“I shouldn’t,” she sighed. “But...okay. It’s been one of those days, you know?” 

A loud, unified bellow of “If you’ll be my bodyguard, I could be your long-lost pal” erupted from Archie’s side of the coffee shop, as they hit the part of the song to which everyone actually knew the words. 

“Name for the order?” Jughead asked, punching an order for one hot tea into the register. “It’ll take me a minute to do the blend. I’ll bring it out when it’s ready.” 

Two green eyes twinkled at him. “You can call me Betty.” 

“Very funny,” he said automatically. 

She snorted. “Not a joke. It is actually Betty.” 

Betty took a seat at the lone unoccupied table after she paid, pulling an enormous engineering test prep study book from her backpack. She tucked a red pencil behind one ear and crossed her legs at the knee. She had excellent posture. 

As the tea steeped, Jughead’s eyes drifted to the pastry case. One strawberry jam tart remained, the glazed points of its crown-shaped crust (it was necessary to have a brand, after all) shining enticingly in the soft lighting. 

“On the house,” he said when Betty raised a questioning eyebrow at the warmed jam tart he placed in front of her. 

For some reason, the eyebrow was having a very strange effect on him, one he couldn’t quite define, but which seemed to be making time slow down, as though he was navigating this interaction through the enormous batch of Madagascar vanilla bean simple syrup that he’d whipped up during a slow hour the previous day. 

A tiny smile appeared on her face. 

In the time it had taken him to walk to her table, a line of five customers had appeared at the register; he couldn’t take the time for him to stand there like an idiot, waiting for her reaction. Forcing Betty’s exquisite jawline from his mind, he returned to the counter and began taking orders. 

As he pulled the first shot of espresso, he glanced over at Betty’s table. She was deep in her book, but with a fork in hand. Several bites of jam tart had disappeared. 

This was ridiculous. 

Pretty women smiled at him literally every day. Many of them moaned at him. Often, they told him he was a lifesaver, or even a god. (He understood. He inevitably felt that way himself upon his first morning sip of delicious single-origin nectar.) 

“Got to keep the customer satisfied,” Archie sang. 

_Well_ , Jughead told himself, _that’s all you were doing_.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: this chapter takes a somewhat darker turn. Not anywhere near as dark as canon, but. You know.

  
  
  
  


_I'm my own soulmate_  
_I know how to love me_  
_I know that I'm always gonna hold me down_  
_Yeah, I'm my own soulmate_  
_No, I'm never lonely_  
_I know I'm a queen but I don't need no crown_  
\- Lizzo, “Soulmate”

  
  
  
  


Once upon a time, in a faraway land, Betty Cooper believed in fairy tales. Then she grew up. 

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, Betty Cooper crept into her older sister’s bedroom and snuck one romance novel after another from under Polly’s mattress, where the books were hidden from their mother. She would read as all bookwormish girls did, under her covers with a flashlight, stopping only when her eyelids became so heavy she could no longer keep them lifted. 

“You shouldn’t read those books, girls,” Alice told them. She was their birth mother, not their stepmother, but anyone who watched enough Disney movies would have begged to differ. “They’re ludicrous.” 

Alice Cooper believed in soulmates, of course—everyone did; they were a fact of life. But Alice Cooper did not believe in encouraging her children to indulge in sheer fantasy. 

“Besides,” Alice continued, “these novels contain sexually explicit material, do they not? You’re far too young for that.” 

Polly Cooper, who with her pinafore dresses and grosgrain headbands looked younger than she was, screeched “I’m fourteen!” and stomped out of the living room. 

Betty Cooper, age twelve, knew even then that there was not one single thing her mother could have said that was _more_ likely to make her daughters continue reading romance novels behind her back. They often walked from their house on Elm Street to the public library together. There was danger in the city, their parents said, but here, in their small wooded town just outside the Chicago suburbs, everything was safe. Nothing bad ever happened. 

_The Perfect Mark_ , Betty read. _Birds of a Feather. Words of Love. Two Minds, One Heart_. Polly preferred fantasy romances, ones in which the world provided tangible proof you’d found your soulmate. Her favorite subgenre was the soulmark: characters who knew they were destined for each other because of birthmarks. Sometimes the birthmarks were ordinary, and sometimes they were elaborate, tattoo-like designs. Sometimes they were initials, and sometimes they were entire poems. 

Betty devoured the books just as her sister did. But, as she became a woman (biologically, anyway—she wouldn’t even be thirteen for another month), she realized that she and Polly digested these romances very, very differently. While Polly read the stories through rose-colored spectacles, drinking in the fantasies like so much fresh-squeezed orange juice, Betty refracted the texts as though reading them through prisms, searching for different shades and angles. 

The sex parts were…well, she learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, she learned what she thought about romance. 

She did not like the idea that there might be a person in the world destined just for her. She did not like the idea that her fate might be written on her skin. She knew, of course, that it wasn’t _literally_ written on her skin; some couples got matching soulmark tattoos, but that was a choice—soulmarks didn’t appear spontaneously. 

The point was the same, though.

She did not like the idea that she did not have a say in the matter. 

It was too easy, already, to feel as though she might never be given a say in anything else about her own life. When she’d wanted to play T-ball, she’d been steered into ballet. When she’d asked for violin lessons, she’d been sat down at a piano. When she’d written Santa that she wanted a blue bicycle for Christmas, she’d received a pink one. 

Polly’s favorite stories were the ones in which soulmate connections were so obvious as to be undeniable, and Betty’s were the ones in which soulmates did not exist at all. To find someone and choose to love them—and for them to choose you, not because Fate said so but because they _wanted_ to choose you—surely, she thought, that was the most romantic possibility imaginable. 

Really, the only thing about romance that the Cooper sisters seemed to agree on was that when they got there themselves, the opinions of their parents would not be taken into account. 

And really, _really_ , Betty preferred mystery novels.

  
  
  
  


When Betty Cooper was fourteen years old, Polly found her soulmate.

When Betty Cooper was fourteen and a half years old, Polly became pregnant. 

When Betty Cooper was fifteen years old, her father was arrested for attempted murder.

  
  
  
  


Even now, at the age of twenty-six and with years of therapy under her belt, a particularly humid day could still trigger Betty’s anxiety. It was humid on _that_ day, eleven years ago, when she watched her father aim and fire a hunting rifle at her sister’s soulmate’s father. 

That Clifford Blossom hadn’t died was a miracle. His blood pooled on the floor of the old Blossom family lake house, seeping into the rustic wooden floorboards even as Alice Cooper screamed and Polly Cooper screamed and Penelope Blossom screamed and Cheryl Blossom screamed and… 

Betty Cooper did not scream. Betty froze. Then her junior lifeguard training kicked in—not that it had covered gunshots, specifically, but she knew what to do. She clenched her teeth, rushed to Clifford’s side, and applied pressure to the wound with her new summer cream-colored cardigan. 

In the aftermath, it came to light that her father hadn’t tried to murder _merely_ his daughter’s soulmate’s father. He had tried to murder his own long-estranged twin brother.

  
  
  
  


Thankfully, she was just beginning her lunch break when the call she’d been dreading for the last decade came. Grabbing her phone, she hurried to lock the door of the break room.

“Mom?”

“It’s good news, Elizabeth,” said Betty’s mother, and Betty collapsed right back into her stackable plastic chair. 

“No,” she said. “No, Mom, it’s—”

“Your father has paid his debt to society,” Alice said, talking right over her. “ _Not_ that he owed it in the first place. He hasn’t put a foot wrong the entire time he’s been in that prison, and you know it. He’s earned this parole.” 

Intellectually, Betty believed offenders should have a chance to serve their time and learn from their mistakes. She did. She did believe that. 

But she’d watched her father try to _murder_ someone. 

“I’d like you to come home for a few days when he’s released,” Alice continued, naming a date just a few weeks in the future. “It would mean so much to him to know his entire family hasn’t abandoned him. To _both_ of us.”

  
  
  
  


After she hung up with her mother, Betty stared at the two untouched halves of turkey sandwich on the plate in front of her. There was a sliced avocado on the sandwich; it had been perfectly ripe this morning, and there would never be a better time to eat it. There was a slice of perfectly ripe tomato, too. She stared at the sandwich for a good long while. 

The doorknob rattled, and Betty jumped to her feet. 

“Sorry!” she called. “I’m coming.” 

Her paper plate disappeared into the trash can, swallowed whole in a balloon of black plastic bag, the turkey sandwich it carried still untouched.  
Betty returned to her cubicle, pulled up a contact she’d kept through five cell phone upgrades, and hit dial.

  
  
  
  


As his attempted murder charge wove its way through the courts, Hal Cooper directly contradicted all advice from counsel. Refusing to accept a plea bargain that would’ve gotten him out much sooner, he instead insisted on pleading innocent and taking the case to trial. Once the trial commenced, he called himself to the stand, arguing that while he had indeed pulled the trigger, he was not responsible for his own actions. 

“It wasn’t _me_ ,” he said, all the pleading he could muster in his voice. “It was the urges. The urges made me do it.” 

He wove a terrific tale of childhood trauma, of the cold-hearted bullying he’d received at the hands of his twin brother, of the recurring nightmare that Clifford would come after his family. 

“Every time I close my eyes, I see him hurting Alice and the girls.” He looked into the gallery, and as his gaze landed on his youngest daughter, her perspective seemed to shift. She was watching the scene unfold from some other vantage point now, from a great distance that was somehow closer than before, and her father’s voice, so quiet she could barely hear it, reverberated so loudly in her ears that her whole head seemed to throb. “I had to protect my family, don’t you understand? Alice is my soulmate. I had no choice.” 

Almost immediately, the speech went viral. Some thinkpieces called Betty’s father a madman or a psychopath. Others said that such a strong urge to protect your loved ones was not just acceptable; it was downright romantic. 

But in invoking his urges, Hal Cooper hammered the nails into his own proverbial coffin. After all, following a soulmate urge was not—nor had it ever been—an acceptable legal defense.

  
  
  
  


Even before the dust settled—before the verdict was handed down, before Hal was sentenced, before Betty could take the SATs for which she was still determinedly studying—Polly ran away. Seated in the front of an ancient, beat-up car that Jason had procured with God only knew what money, she gripped Betty’s forearms with fingers whose nails had been bitten to the quick. A drop of blood oozed from one shredded cuticle. Betty could not take her eyes from it. 

“Swear to me you won’t tell Mom where we’ve gone,” Polly demanded, her eyes wide and bright. “Swear to me, Betty, or I’ll never speak to you again.” 

Betty nodded, and as she did, she felt a familiar urge, one she’d been feeling since Polly first introduced them to Jason, and one she’d long since stopped trying to fight. Relief washed over her as her fingernails dug in. “I swear.”

From the driver’s seat, Jason leaned over to hand Betty a burner phone; she had to quickly wipe the blood from her palms onto the seat of her denim shorts, and hoped it wouldn’t be too visible there. 

“We’ll be in touch,” he said. “Don’t let Alice know anything. Don’t let my parents know anything. If you need an ally, you can call my sister, her number’s programmed in there—” 

“Jason, she knows,” Polly said patiently. “We’ve been over this.” 

A final round of good-byes was exchanged. Then, with a jerk and several sputters, the getaway car rolled into a thick crepuscular fog.

  
  
  
  


An hour or so after she’d dialed that number and left a voicemail, Betty’s cell rang.

“Betty? I got your voicemail.” 

Betty hadn’t heard this voice in a few years, but it was every bit as warm and comforting as she remembered. Maternal, really. Not for the first time, Betty wondered how different her life might have been if she’d had Mary Andrews for a mother and Alice Cooper for a lawyer. 

(Alice wasn’t a lawyer at all, of course. Skilled at arguing though Betty’s mother was, given Alice’s penchant for flexible morality, the legal system was undoubtedly better off this way.) 

(And Mary wasn’t _Betty’s_ lawyer, per se. She wasn’t even Hal’s lawyer anymore. There had been a mutually agreed-upon parting of ways after Betty’s father did exactly the things Mary told him not to do.) 

“Hi, Mary,” she said, a weight lifting off her shoulders at once. “Do you have time to talk?” 

“I take it there’s news about your father?” 

Betty nodded, though she knew Mary couldn’t see her. “The day has finally come. Or it is coming. Soon.” 

There was a pause, and then Mary said, “I’m in court until close today. Could you meet after then? Maybe before dinner?” 

“That would be great.” 

“Tell you what,” Mary said. “My son—you never met him, did you? He was always back East with his father.”

 _Arthur?_ Betty thought, and then rifled through a few other names—Adam, Aiden, Ambrose—before the right one popped into mind. 

“Archie?” 

“Well, he’s in Chicago now, and he and a friend of his have just opened up the cutest little coffee shop in Andersonville. Is that inconvenient for you?”

“Really? No, that’s perfect. I live in Andersonville now, actually. Where is it?” 

She wrote down the address, said good-bye, and tried to go back to work. 

She made it until two o’clock on the dot, and then, she simply could not stand to be in the office any longer.

  
  
  
  


Once upon a time, Betty Cooper’s father had taught her to fix cars. She loved working with him in the garage. She loved the time she got to spend with him and him alone (Polly had zero interest in such things). She loved _fixing_ things. Soon, she began to apply her mechanical talents to other areas. She was eight when she figured out how to pick locks; eleven when she learned how to entirely disassemble and reassemble doorknobs. In her freshman year of high school, she joined the cheerleading squad, the newspaper staff, and the robotics team; by her senior year, she was in charge of all three, and still found time to star in the school musical.

No one ever expected a girl who looked like Betty to be an engineering whiz. Which she enjoyed more—fixing things, or silently destroying everyone’s expectations—she never could figure out. 

Alice expected her to follow in both of her parents’ footsteps and pursue journalism; Hal, on the rare occasions Betty agreed to visit him, suggested Betty might be happiest if she found her soulmate as soon as possible and settled down to raise children; Polly, Jason, and their ever-increasing number of children extended an invitation for Betty to come live with them on their maple syrup farm in Quebec. 

“You might meet your soulmate here, Betty,” Polly said, again and again. “Don’t you ever have the urge to just get in your car and drive north?” And sometimes Betty _did_ think that just leaving everything behind might be wonderful and freeing. But she also knew that Polly’s was not the path she wanted her life to take. 

Betty thought she wanted to fix things, but as she began exploring her options, she realized that wasn’t good enough. She didn’t just want to fix things. She wanted to build them.

  
  
  
  


Now with four years of work experience under her belt, Betty was eligible to take the Principles and Practice of Engineering Exam when it was next offered in October. If she passed—no, she told herself, _when_ she passed—she would be a licensed civil engineer. 

Polly still refused to let Betty tell their parents where she was. 

The irony of Betty’s choice to devote her professional life to literally building bridges was not lost on her. 

Many people had told Betty that she would find more freedom and flexibility working at a private company. The urge to potentially make a lot of money did strike her on occasion, but she thought she could do more meaningful work in the public sector and had been employed with the City of Chicago since her graduation from college. It was the right choice, she knew. She had a great boss, one who was willing to let her take the occasional afternoon off to study for her PE exam. 

She took one of those afternoons now. She still had a couple of hours until she was due to meet Mary. Surely, though—surely, once she’d taken a bit of a walk, once she’d settled herself in some alternate location—surely, then, she would be able to make herself focus. 

Her phone rang again, and though she did not want to answer it, she did. 

“Mom?” 

“Have you given any more thought to coming home for the weekend?” Alice demanded.

  
  
  
  


A sixteen-year-old Betty Cooper balled a tissue into each hand and squeezed tightly.

“I don’t understand.” 

Betty didn’t want to cry. She didn’t ever want to cry. She especially did not want to cry now, not as she sat in a worn leather armchair in her father’s lawyer’s office, worrying her palms into the knees of the cable-knit tights she’d worn under her best corduroy skirt. But Mary seemed particularly sympathetic, or maybe empathetic was the better word; even after years on the student paper, Betty wasn’t always sure of the difference between the two. As soon as Hal’s trial began, she found herself drawn more and more to her AP math class. Math, or at least the math she was studying, had right and wrong answers. There was no subjective truth. 

“What don’t you understand?” Mary asked. 

“Why she won’t leave him.” Betty found she could no longer keep her tears in check. “She saw him, just like I did. She saw him try to murder someone, and she’s staying with him, because they’re _soulmates_.” 

Silently, Mary handed Betty yet another tissue. 

The next words slipped out before Betty could stop them. “You’re divorced.” Almost no one got divorced; why would you, if you’d married your soulmate? If someone was divorced, it was considered impolite to mention it. 

And yet, it seemed to Betty that her mother would be much better off without her father. It seemed to Betty that surely, an attempted murder ought to destroy any urges her mother felt to have sex with her father. Aside from the release of digging fingernails into flesh, Betty had yet to meet an urge she couldn’t control. She failed to understand why other people couldn’t seem to do the same. 

“Yes,” Mary said, nodding. She didn’t seem upset by the statement. 

“What happened?” 

The older woman’s gaze drifted from Betty to a framed picture on her desk. It was of Mary with her ex-husband and her son. Based on her knowledge that Mary’s son was her age, she thought it must be quite recent. Mary’s son was on the tall side, with broad shoulders and amazing cheekbones. He had inherited his mother’s red hair and his father’s kind eyes. All Betty knew of him came from the pictures scattered around Mary’s office. Still, she thought, he seemed like the kind of boy who would be very easy to like. 

“Fred was—is, I suppose—my soulmate,” Mary said. “But I wasn’t his. It happens. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. He said I was his, and I believed him for a long time. I think he really wanted to believe it was true. But eventually, we both realized he was lying.” 

She took a sharp inhale; Betty waited on the edge of her seat while Mary slowly let the breath out. 

“You both have to feel it to make it work in the long run, whatever _it_ is,” Mary concluded. “Honestly, at this point, my main concern is that Archie might be affected somehow.”

“There’s no scientific evidence that children whose parents aren’t soulmates have increased difficulty finding their own,” announced Betty. She had been researching this of late, just in case Polly came to her senses and realized Jason wasn’t her soulmate after all. 

Mary smiled fondly. “He’s—well, he’s a bit girl-crazy, to be honest. Maybe more than is healthy. But I try not to worry. He’ll find the right girl, I think, eventually.”

  
  
  
  


A block from the coffee shop, Betty felt a very particular twinge, one she’d felt every four weeks since the month before her thirteenth birthday. 

The irony of Betty’s period deciding to arrive three days early, on the day she’d chosen to wear a white linen suit, was not lost on her. 

It was fine, though. She had tampons in her bag. She always did. She fumbled around for them as she walked, her fingers searching for the familiar case she kept them in. 

Just outside the coffee shop doors, Betty found herself staring not at the oddly spray-painted letters proclaiming _Ninia_ , but the inside of her laptop bag. 

“No,” she said out loud, to herself. 

It was fine. Everything was fine.

  
  
  
  


She recognized Archie as soon as she stepped through the door; he sat on a table in one corner, strumming an acoustic guitar and leading a Paul Simon singalong. He still had Mary’s red hair and his father’s kind eyes, along with the broad shoulders and amazing cheekbones. He still seemed very much like the kind of person who would be easy to like. 

In fact, the entire coffee shop seemed easy to like. 

_Quite the atmosphere_ , she thought: an older building, and remodeled thoughtfully, but with touches here and there that were somewhat bizarre. She had never seen this many vintage table lamps outside an antique shop, and although the counter was shiny, new, and modern, a Billy the Big Mouth Bass was stuck on the wall behind it. 

It was terrible, that fish, and the sheer incongruity of it somehow calmed her.

  
  
  
  


As Betty made her way to Ninia’s restroom, clutching a key affixed to a novelty oversized magnifying glass, she passed a framed review on the wall. She didn’t pause to read it, but nevertheless registered that she ought to—as soon as she found the tampons that she knew must be in one of her bags somewhere. 

Several minutes later, she admitted defeat. Her tampon case was not in either bag. She must have moved it to her non-work handbag, and forgotten to move it back.

It was fine, though. In the very first sign that Fate might not have it out for her today after all, there was a bouquet of her very favorite brand of tampons, nicely arranged in a mug on the back of the toilet.

  
  
  
  


On her way back through the hallway, she paused to skim the review, rolling her eyes as soon as she realized what tactic the reviewer had taken. More interesting was the accompanying photo, which showed Archie alongside three other men. She recognized one of them as the barista who’d given her the restroom key, and studied his expression for a moment. Grumpy, she thought, but not in a bad way. Grumpy like he had better things to do than be styled and posed for a picture. Or maybe it was a tired grumpy; the dark circles under his eyes were almost alarming. 

She paused for a moment to admire some of the details they’d left in the building, and then returned to the counter. 

Archie seemed easy to like. Liking this man— _Jughead_ , of all things, according to both the photo caption and the name tag on his apron—seemed as though it might be more of a challenge. 

He brought her a fresh, warm, strawberry jam tart that she hadn’t ordered. One whiff of the pastry sent her stomach churning, a reminder that she hadn’t eaten a single bite of lunch and it was now after four. 

The tart was delicious. 

Sneaking a glance at the counter over one of her many study guides, Betty watched Jughead fiddle with the espresso machine, and thought: _Challenge accepted_.

  
  
  
  


By the time Mary arrived at the coffee shop, Jughead and Archie were both gone, their shifts having apparently ended. Behind the counter now was another man, also attractive, whose name tag read _Fangs_. To each their own, Betty supposed, and anyway, a nickname like “Fangs” went well with the coffee shop’s occasional snake-themed touch. 

(There was a special listed on the chalkboard, a latte with housemade Madagascar vanilla bean simple syrup, with the extremely stupid moniker of a Whyte Wyrm. Nevertheless, it sounded delicious, and Betty made a mental note to come try one when she wasn’t fighting off an anxiety attack.) 

Fangs lit up when Mary entered the coffee shop, and seemed surprised but pleased when he realized Betty knew her. 

“The usual?” he called, as Mary sat down. She nodded, and he soon brought over two mugs of tea—something pretty and pink and fruity for Mary, and the same lightly sweetened chamomile-lavender blend for Betty. “Jug left a note,” he explained. 

“Thank you, Fangs,” Mary said. “I appreciate it. Is Archie out for the day?” 

Fangs nodded. “He’s got a gig tonight, backing up that Josie girl again. It’s somewhere on the South Side, so he had to leave early.” 

“That’s too bad,” Mary said, settling her hands in her lap. “I’d hoped you would get to finally meet him, Betty. Or did you?”

“No,” Betty admitted. “I’ve kind of just been sitting here with my head in my books.” 

“Another time, then.” She took a sip of tea, then assessed Betty—critically, Betty thought, but not in a bad way. It was more of a constructive criticism. “When is Hal getting out? Tell me everything.” 

Betty took a deep breath and began talking.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued...)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to village-skeptic for all her thoughts. As always, I would love to know yours ❤️


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I've made [a playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/493ooZtneLlCiOvsblFC2D?si=9i3GxbNFRnyrfqpaIFEHoQ)

_Sociability, it's hard enough for me_  
_Take me away from this big bad world_  
_And agree to marry me_  
_So we could start over again_  
Blur, “Coffee and TV”

  
  
  
  


Jughead was just taking the morning’s second pan of brownies out of the oven when he heard the first knock at the back door. 

“You’re late, Archie.” 

The person on the other side of the door had red hair, but it was in ringlet curls, and she wore yet another oddly toddler-like dress instead of running clothes. 

“I’m not late, and I’m not Archie,” Ethel replied. “Hi, Jug.” 

“Hi. Come on in.” Jughead gestured Ethel and her dolly cart of breads through the door, then pulled his phone out and sent Archie a quick _Where are you, man?_ text before returning to his own baked goods. 

Typically, Jughead rotated a considerable portion of the pastry menu—he found it boring to make the same things every single day. Typically, he only made strawberry jam tarts on Mondays and Wednesdays. 

Typically. 

But he had felt like making them on Thursday, and again on Friday. Now it was Saturday, and he once again found himself automatically reaching for the strawberry jam. 

“Have you considered hiring more staff?” asked Ethel, interrupting Jughead’s train of thought. “It seems like you’re shouldering a lot of the load, Jughead. I mean, I get it, but from one small business owner to another—” She plopped the last of the brioche loaves onto the counter. “Trust me. You have to give yourself breaks, or you’ll crash and burn.” 

Ethel was right, and Jughead knew it, but he nevertheless bristled at the idea. The additional salary costs were one thing to consider, but on top of that, he couldn’t shake the fear that a larger staff would make it harder to ensure quality control. 

“Especially not if Archie’s going to bail on you.” 

“I doubt he _bailed_ ,” Jughead said. He tried and failed to remember if Archie had come home last night. There were endless downsides to waking up at four every morning, working a fourteen-hour shift on your feet, and then doing the books and other odds and ends once you left, and one of them was a complete inability to stay awake past ten p.m. “He probably just went home with some girl from the gig he played last night and forgot to set his alarm.” 

Ethel regarded Jughead shrewdly for a moment. “Not the first time, huh?” 

“Did you want a latte, Ethel?” The question came out more like an accusation, and Jughead sighed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—it’s just a little stressful this morning.” 

“You’re sweet,” Ethel said, smiling at him, and for half a glorious second, Jughead thought she was going to reject the offer. “I’d love one.”

  
  
  
  


Sweet Pea arrived a few minutes after Ethel departed, and one of the high school kids came in just before opening. Even without Archie, everything was going smoothly—except that Jughead still had not managed to make those damn strawberry jam tarts. 

Maybe Betty wouldn’t show up this morning, he thought. That was likely. There was no reason for her to come to his coffee shop on a Saturday, or ever again. 

He unlocked the front doors and pushed them open, looking down as he nudged the doorstop into place with his toe. 

He straightened up, and found himself looking directly into Betty’s bright green eyes. 

Today she wore casual clothes, a light blue t-shirt and denim cutoffs. Both her overladen bags were slung over her shoulders, though; Jughead’s heart beat just the tiniest bit faster when he realized she might be here for hours, studying. He took a step back and gestured her inside. 

“Hello again,” he said as they both walked to the register. “No jam tarts today, I’m afraid.” 

“It’s okay.” Surprise was evident on her face, as though she hadn’t expected him to remember her. “I mean, I won’t lie, I’ve been thinking about them since Wednesday night. But I’m open to other options. What else would you recommend?” 

Something about Betty’s general aura made him think she wasn’t the kind of woman who would eat a giant chocolate chip cookie at seven in the morning, so he said, “Cheese danish?” 

“Cheese danish it is, then. And one of those vanilla lattes? I was thinking that sounded really good the other day.” She nodded at the specials board. 

“A Whyte Wyrm? Or a regular vanilla latte?” 

“What’s the difference?” 

“Housemade syrup versus the regular stuff.” 

“Oh, housemade,” Betty said. “Definitely housemade.” 

Jughead nodded. “Hot or iced?” 

“Hot, please.” 

She took the same seat she’d taken on Wednesday, and buried herself in her books, where she stayed until almost ten. Every so often, he noticed her looking around. Every so often, he noticed her fix her eyes on a certain element of the décor, consider it thoughtfully, and smile.

  
  
  
  


By closing time, which thankfully was three p.m. on the weekends, Jughead was beyond exhausted. Archie had never showed at all, and he wasn’t answering texts. Calls went straight to voicemail. There was no need for alarm yet, just annoyance; this was still within the range of what passed for normal Archie Andrews behavior. If he’d been out with a girl all night (and morning, and afternoon), his phone was probably dead. 

As Jughead staggered towards the brownstone, all he could think about was stuffing his face with the burger he’d just picked up, taking a shower, and crashing on the couch. 

He woke up just after six, roused by the scrape and jangle of the apartment door opening. “Hey, Jug,” Archie said, oblivious as always. “Were you asleep?” 

“Where were you this morning?” Jughead demanded. “I was expecting you.” 

Archie’s brow furrowed. “I texted you that I wasn’t coming in.” 

“No, you didn’t. I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” 

“My phone died right as I was sending you the text—I was at Josie’s all night, forgot to take my charger. Maybe it never went through.” 

“Even if it did go through, I still would have been prepping alone with no notice. Arch, I don’t want to be a wet blanket here, but you’ve got to take this _seriously_ , we—” 

“Whoa, whoa. That’s not fair. I’ve been putting in at least eight hours a day, six days a week, for the last few months.” 

Jughead took a deep breath, counting to ten as he released it. He knew Archie wasn’t wrong, just as Ethel hadn’t been wrong. And yet… 

Crossing to the couch, Archie plopped down and placed a hand on Jughead’s knee. “I’m starting to worry about you. You’ve worked every day for the last _two years_.” 

“We haven’t even been open two months.” 

“Yeah, but you were working nonstop before then, with the renovations and the planning, and your last job before that, and—Jughead, look.” He swept a hand over the coffee table, which was strewn with the remains of Jughead’s lunch; the remains consisted of nearly _all_ of Jughead’s lunch. “Since when do you fall asleep without eating? And when was the last time you did any writing?” 

Jughead took another deep breath. His clothes reeked of stale coffee. His novel had not been touched since last Christmas.

“Maybe you should come out with me one of these nights,” Archie continued. “Relax. Live a little. You might even meet someone.” 

“I don’t want to go out,” Jughead grumbled automatically. “You know that.” 

Archie heaved the long-practiced sigh of someone who’d been having a version of this conversation approximately once a month since the age of nine. “Fine, but you know you’re never going to find your soulmate if you keep following your urge to be a hermit,” he said. “Now get up. I ran into my mom when I was coming in just now, and she wants us to come up for dinner.” 

Mary wasn’t a particularly good cook, but food he didn’t have to think about procuring for himself sounded excellent.

“And change your shirt, man,” Archie added, wrinkling his nose.

  
  
  
  


The moment he walked through the door of the upstairs unit, Jughead realized he—or rather, Archie—had made a mistake. Mary had not invited _them_ to dinner; Mary had invited _Archie_ to dinner. This was obvious because only three place settings graced her dining table, the seat that did not have a place setting was the one Jughead always took when he and Archie came up, and there was already a third person in the apartment. 

_Betty._

He was glad he’d changed his t-shirt. 

“Hey, Mom, we’re here,” Archie called. 

“ _We_?” Mary came around the corner from the kitchen, untying the waist ribbon of an old apron. 

To her credit, Mary recovered quickly from her surprise. She recovered more quickly than Jughead did from his, and bustled into the kitchen for another plate while he was still trying to hold himself upright, certain as he was that someone had just punched him in the stomach (but in a good way). Betty had changed from her morning t-shirt and shorts into a cotton dress. The dress was lavender with pretty little pink and yellow flowers, and it made her look as though she smelled nice. 

(What Jughead actually smelled was the sharp tomato-paste pang of turkey meatloaf, one of three dishes Mary reliably served.) 

From the kitchen, Mary called, “Archie, Jughead, this is Betty Cooper. Betty, this is my son, Archie.” A rattle came from the silverware drawer. “And I think you’ve met Jughead at the coffee shop already?” 

“I have,” Betty said, smiling, just as Jughead blurted out an accusatory “How do _you_ know Mary?” 

The smile fell right off Betty’s face and was replaced by a mild scowl. Her fingers bunched into tight fists, then pressed into the outsides of her thighs. “Excuse me?” 

Archie, who had bounded across the room to shake Betty’s hand only to find it inaccessible, now looked as though he couldn’t figure out what to do with any of his limbs. This lasted for only a moment before comprehension dawned. 

“You’re the one with the dad,” he said. _The_ dad, like everyone didn’t have at least a biological father. “It’s so cool to finally meet you after all these years.” 

“All these—” Jughead started, more confused than ever. 

“Oh, Jug won’t care. Or, like, judge you, or anything,” Archie continued. “Mom’s defended his dad a bunch of times.” 

“Archie!” gasped Mary, burying her face in one hand. 

Weirdly enough, this did seem to calm Betty—or at least intrigue her enough to uncross her arms. She raised a questioning eyebrow at Jughead, who shrugged. Normally, he wouldn’t reveal that kind of information to a near-stranger. But Betty was different, he reasoned. For one thing, she clearly knew Mary pretty well, even if she was just now meeting Archie. That had to mean something, even if he couldn’t put a finger on what that thing was. 

“My dad used to run a gang,” he said, dropping into his usual chair. “Mostly small-time shit, like dealing weed. But he had a few DUIs on top of that, so. Legal representation became a necessity every so often.” 

“Ah,” Betty replied. She looked as though she had further questions, but did not ask them. 

Mary gestured her into one of the seats next to Jughead, and then quickly ran around the table to Jughead’s other side, so that Archie had no choice but to sit next to Betty. 

“Isn’t this nice,” Mary said, standing up again. “I’ll just start bringing dinner in—no, you sit, Betty. Jughead will help me carry. Won’t you, Jughead?”

  
  
  
  


Dinner conversation was polite, and dominated by Archie, whom Mary kept engaged in a dialogue about his music. Jughead would have been bored by the discussion even had he not heard all of it before, and said little, focusing his attention on the turkey meatloaf instead. Mary clearly didn’t begrudge his unscheduled appearance _too_ much; his plate definitely came out of the kitchen with almost twice as much food on it as anyone else’s. 

(Or maybe the portion size was a ploy to keep him occupied, and therefore silent, throughout the meal.) 

After he’d scraped the last little bit of roast potato from the plate and licked his fork clean, Jughead stood up. 

“I’ll clear,” he offered, gathering up Archie’s and Mary’s plates. His motivations were not entirely altruistic; now that he’d eaten, exhaustion was seeping back into his bones. The sooner this little party was over, the better, even if that meant less time spent with Betty. 

“I’ll help,” Betty said at once, jumping to her feet before Mary could protest. 

She followed him into the kitchen, where she immediately turned the faucet on. Instead of rinsing the plates, though, she turned to Jughead. 

“Oh, my god,” she half-whispered, barely audible over the water. “I am so sorry, Jughead.” 

“For what?” 

She widened her already-wide eyes towards the dining room. “When Mary invited me over for dinner, I thought it was just to catch up. We haven’t seen each other in a few years, and I—well, I’m going through some stuff with my dad right now. I had _no idea_ she was trying to set me up with Archie.” 

Jughead chuckled. “If it makes you feel any better, she obviously didn’t let Archie in on that, either.” 

“I get the feeling she normally wouldn’t have to,” she said, rather shrewdly. “Is he still girl-crazy? That was, like, the one thing I knew about him, when… well, when Mary was defending my dad.” 

“He is,” Jughead confirmed. He rinsed the three plates he’d brought into the kitchen, and then took Betty’s from her and rinsed that, too. “He’s slowed down a lot, though. Hasn’t claimed to have found his soulmate in at least eighteen months.” 

There was a long, long pause, during which Jughead tried not to think about the fact that Betty had apparently not found hers either, and then Betty said, “I wonder what made Mary want to set me up with him.” 

Before Jughead could answer _What **wouldn’t** make a parent wish you were their child’s soulmate?_, Archie stuck his head into the kitchen. 

“Hey, Jughead, Betty,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a gig tonight. Do you guys want to come?” 

“Oh, I don’t—” Betty started, but she turned to Jughead instead of finishing. 

“Arch, I’m half-dead on my feet already, and I’ve got to get up at four. All I want to do is finish the ice cream in the freezer, get through an episode or two of something on Netflix, and go to bed.” 

He braced himself to be on the receiving end of an exasperated look, one that clearly said _Jug, we just talked about this_. Jughead had no intention of going out, though—not even if it was Saturday night, and not even if he got to go sort-of with Betty Cooper. 

Instead, the edges of Archie’s ears turned pink. They’d been friends for long enough for Jughead to know exactly what _that_ meant. 

“You ate the rest of the ice cream, didn’t you?” 

As the three of them headed down to the first floor, he could have sworn he heard Betty stifle a giggle. 

“I’m going to head home, I think,” she told Archie. “Thanks for the invite, though—it’s just been a really long week for me. Rain check?”

  
  
  
  


Sure enough, the freezer was devoid of ice cream. 

“Damn it,” Jughead muttered. It was _July_ , for god’s sake; a man deserved to have his freezer stocked with frozen, sugary delights—not just microwavable burritos, fruit for Archie’s morning protein smoothies, and a couple of orange Popsicles left over from the cold they’d shared all winter. 

The Popsicles were as good as he was going to get without leaving the brownstone, though, and he was too tired to leave. So he unwrapped one and shoved it in his mouth, cringing slightly when the stale ice crystals that clung to its surface hit his tongue. 

Fifteen minutes later, clutching the empty Popsicle stick between his teeth, Jughead still had not decided on something to watch. He threw the Roku remote on the coffee table. It had been so long since he’d allowed himself a TV break, and now he couldn’t even decide on a show. 

Maybe if he had another Popsicle. 

Just as his hand hit the freezer door handle, the doorbell rang. 

“Damn it, Archie,” he groaned aloud. “First you eat the ice cream, then you don’t show up for work, _then_ you forget your keys—”

He trudged to the front door, but when he peered through the peephole, he did not see Archie on the other side. He saw Betty Cooper, and she was holding a plastic shopping bag from the corner store. 

Jughead was sure he’d never opened a door so fast in his life. 

“Hi, Betty.” 

“Hi,” she said, baring her teeth in a nervous smile. “Um, I know this is weird, but…” She licked her lips once, then set her shoulders back. “Have you ever just gotten an uncontrollable urge for ice cream?” 

He stood aside to let her in. “It’s been known to happen.” 

“Well, I hate you for mentioning it earlier. Look what I did.” Once they’d reached his tiny kitchen, she held the bag open so he could see inside. “I usually don’t give into my urges, but this one—well, it felt safe enough. And then I just sort of spiraled out of control.” 

Two pints of Haagen-Daaz vanilla, a pint of strawberries, a package of wafer cookies, a jar of fudge sauce, and a can of whipped cream were quickly unloaded onto the counter, while Jughead wondered what on earth Betty meant by _safe enough_. He didn’t have much time to muse on it, however, as she ran a hand over the ancient four-cup coffee pot that sat next to the sink, and turned to him with a look of amusement. 

“I’m surprised you let a relic like this in your house,” she said. “Automatic drip brew, really? I would’ve expected a fancy French press or a pour-over...thingy. Whatever they’re called.” 

“Some people call it a brewer, some people call it a dripper. And I do have all those things. I just don’t use them at home.” 

Betty continued to look skeptical. She reached behind the coffee pot and pulled out the bag that lived there. “And a supermarket brand of pre-ground beans? Jug, am I going to have to revoke your hipster card?” 

“Hey,” he protested. “I’m not a hipster.” 

“You co-own a coffee shop-slash-artisan bakery in Andersonville. All the furniture is deliberately mismatched.” 

Her voice was gently teasing, and as she spoke, the curl at the end of her ever-present ponytail bounced up and down. Suppressing a sudden urge to wrap the curl around his finger and tug—what was he, in kindergarten?—Jughead instead slid past Betty to the silverware drawer, from which he produced an ice cream scoop and a couple of spoons. 

“No,” Betty said. “Go sit down. You spent all day waiting on people; I can do this.” 

Jughead sat down at the kitchen table without further protest. An extremely smart, extremely pretty woman had come out of nowhere to make him an ice cream sundae, and he had zero desire to tempt Fate to change its mind. He watched her move around their kitchen with a practiced ease that made no sense for someone who had never been there before. Bowls, a colander, a cutting board, a paring knife—Betty found each of these in the very first place she looked. 

If Betty found this odd, she did not say so. 

Jughead found it very odd indeed, and wanted to voice that opinion, but his mouth would not form the words. Instead, he said, “That coffee is the kind they serve at the diner in my hometown. The exact kind. I have to have my dad ship it to me, since we don’t have that supermarket chain here.” 

“That seems a bit…” 

“Much. I’m aware. The shipping costs about as much as the coffee itself. It’s just—that’s what I grew up on, you know?” 

Betty paused mid-strawberry rinse. “So it’s a nostalgia thing?” 

“More than that, I think. It’s…” He thought for a moment, trying to find exactly the right words. “Pop’s Choklit Shoppe, that’s the name of the diner. You’d be tempted to think of it as a throwback, it’s all chrome and vinyl and pink neon, but it’s not. Pop’s looked like that when my grandparents were kids, and my dad. It’s timeless. It’s a Riverdale institution. It’s—it was _home_ for me, growing up.” 

“You grew up with Archie, right?” She began coring the strawberries, her fingers deft around the cheap paring knife. 

“Yeah. We’ve been best friends since we were born. Literally. Our dads were best friends, too.”

“Was your mom friends with Mary, too?” 

“My mom?” he chuckled. “The only thing my mom and Mary have in common is that they married men who weren’t their soulmates. I told you Mary had to get my dad out of a lot of legal shit? Well, my mom’s the one who put him in most of it. Only she’s a lot smarter than he is, so she never got caught.” 

“That’s…” Betty trailed off, as though she couldn’t think of a reaction; this was the _exact_ reaction Jughead tended to get on the rare occasions he let someone unlock his tragic backstory. 

“Needless to say, they fought a lot before she left him. I used to grab my laptop and head to Pop’s just to get some peace. He gave free coffee refills, so I’d stay there for hours. All night, sometimes, and—I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Sorry. I know it’s a lot.” 

“It’s not,” Betty said. “I mean, it’s not like hearing it is a burden on me. It’s _you_ , right?” She brought two enormous sundaes to the table, and placed one in front of him with a flourish. “Voilà. Vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, sliced strawberries. Vanilla wafer for textural interest.” 

“What,” Jughead deadpanned, “no cherry on top?” 

Betty shook her head. “Maraschino cherries are gross, Jughead. Fresh strawberries all the way.” 

There was, indeed, a whole strawberry nestled into the pile of whipped cream, its leaves bright green against the red and white and brown. 

“Dig in, Jughead,” she said, picking up her own spoon.

“Don’t need to tell me twice.” 

Aside from the fact that he was eating from a cereal bowl instead of a sundae glass, it was exactly like the sundaes Pop Tate made.

  
  
  
  


They chatted a bit in between bites of ice cream, making the kind of small talk at which Jughead was usually so inept he’d long since given up trying. With Betty, though, the conversation flowed easily. Before he knew it, the ice cream was gone and they were midway through a congenial argument about whether George or Bess was a better right-hand woman. 

“Hey,” Betty said; it felt like a change of subject, and Jughead sat up straighter, mirroring her. “I kind of hate to ask, but is there any chance I could get a cup of that famous Pop’s Choklit Shoppe coffee?” 

Jughead rose to his feet at once, swiping both empty bowls from the table. “Coming right up, m’lady.”

  
  
  
  


While the coffee brewed, Betty moved herself from the kitchen table to the sofa. That was only appropriate, Jughead supposed, as he placed a mug with cream and sugar in front of her. Of course Betty Cooper drank coffee at the coffee table. He placed his own mug of unsweetened black at the other end of the table, then sat, glad for the first time that he and Archie had never gotten around to adding a recliner to their living room décor. 

She’d also turned the TV to WGN. 

“It’s a thing,” she said, when he raised an eyebrow. “My parents are—well, my mom is a journalist. I didn’t follow in her footsteps like she wanted, but I’ve never been able to shake my local news habit.” 

Jughead also liked to watch the local news. He glanced at the nearest clock and discovered it would not be on for another forty-five minutes. 

“So you’re a Chicago girl.” 

“Sort of. Lindenhurst. It’s about fifty miles north of here, not far from the Wisconsin border.” 

Betty watched the TV closely for a moment, though it was now on a commercial break, took a sip of coffee, then turned to Jughead. She still held the mug, he noticed, and oddly. The liquid inside was close to scalding, and yet she had her hands wrapped around the mug, not the handle, with her palms pressed flat against its twin SUNY-Potsdam logos. 

“I imagine either you’ll ask Archie or he’ll tell you without asking,” she said quietly. “I think I’d rather you hear it from me—what he meant earlier, when he said I’m the one with the dad.” 

“Only if you want to tell me,” Jughead said, though every fiber of his being now ached to know. 

“My sister, Polly, she—she found her soulmate really young. She was barely sixteen when they met. They were…well, they weren’t careful, and she was pregnant six months later. That was when my dad lost it.” Betty took a deep breath, closing her eyes, and held the mug even tighter. “That was when we also learned that my sister’s soulmate wasn’t just any old guy. He was—well, my dad had a twin brother. We didn’t know; they were estranged. But his son, Jason, our cousin—he’s Polly’s soulmate.” 

Since he couldn’t think of a single helpful thing to say to this, Jughead said nothing at all; he simply nodded, and hoped Betty would take that as a cue to keep talking. 

“And then my dad tried to kill his brother.” 

Several puzzle pieces clicked into place. “Wait,” he said. “Betty Cooper. Your dad’s _Harold_ Cooper?” 

He immediately wished he hadn’t said anything; Betty’s eyes filled with tears as she nodded yes. 

“You heard? _And_ remembered?” 

“Not exactly. I mean, I first heard about it because Archie talked about his mom’s cases sometimes, and I didn’t remember until you jogged my memory just now. But yeah. I, uh—I was kind of obsessed with the trial for a while, to be honest. That was what, ten years ago?” He waited for Betty’s nod before continuing. “Right when I thought I was going to be the next Truman Capote.”

That earned a slight chuckle from Betty, who still had a death grip on her very hot mug. 

“And I knew he had a second daughter, but I never saw a picture or knew your name or anything,” he added.

She nodded, slowly, gaze focused on her own fingertips. “I was kept out of the press because I was a minor.” 

“Look,” Jughead said, reaching over to her. Hoping he wasn’t being too forward, he gently peeled her palms away from the coffee mug, then put the mug on the table. “I can’t let you burn yourself in my apartment. I only have insurance coverage for that at the shop.” 

Betty seemed not to hear this terrible joke, which he decided was probably for the best. 

“Anyway, that’s why I was at your shop the first time,” she said. “I was meeting Mary there. She hasn’t been his lawyer since the trial, but we’ve sort of kept in touch, and…well, I found out my dad’s getting released on parole soon.” 

An entire group therapy session’s worth of tension seemed to erupt in Betty at that precise moment. Jughead could see it coalesce, right in the muscle that ran between the side of her neck and her left shoulder. He didn’t know what that muscle was called, or whether it was even a single muscle; he wasn’t up to speed on the particulars of the human musculoskeletal system. People might have twenty muscles there. He only knew that he needed to grab his coffee, change the channel, sit on his hands—anything to keep himself from giving into the urge to stroke that precise spot of Betty’s bare, smooth skin. 

The urge. 

The _urge_. 

The urge he’d had to stay in tonight—but that didn’t count. That couldn’t count. He almost never wanted to go out.

The urge he’d had to make strawberry jam tarts this morning, though. 

The urge he’d had to give Betty a strawberry jam tart in the first place. 

As a thought experiment, he imagined kissing Betty, and immediately developed an urge to do it for real. 

She couldn’t be. She _couldn’t_ be. 

Everything Jughead had, he’d worked for. Not in a million years would Fate be so kind as to deliver him someone like Betty Cooper as a soulmate. 

But then… nearly every kindness the universe had ever given him had come through the Andrews family. A hot meal when he needed one. A foster family when he needed one. A co-signer and a startup loan when he needed one. 

But then… then there was the urge she’d had for ice cream. It was a minor urge, to be sure, but also one that had led Betty to be sitting on his sofa. And hadn’t Betty just said the first time she came into his coffee shop was because she was meeting Mary? 

_I don’t usually give into my urges_ , she’d said.

But then... you were supposed to _know_. And he didn’t _know_. He only hoped. 

“So it wasn’t an urge for close anthropological observation of the Chatty Wednesday concept that led you to our doorstep,” he joked. 

(He hoped it sounded as though he was joking.) 

Betty looked up, meeting his gaze with an expression that was about one-tenth amused and nine-tenths deadly serious. 

“I told you, I don’t follow my urges. Not most of them. And before you say anything, yes. I do know that means I’ll never find my so-called soulmate. I’m okay with that.” 

Even through the swamp that was his fatigue, memories—memories of the details of Hal Cooper’s trial, and the soulmate urge defense he’d used—began bubbling to the surface of Jughead’s mind. He remembered wondering at the time what on earth that would feel like: an urge so strong you couldn’t fight it. An urge so strong that you would _kill_ , if it told you to. He remembered wondering if Hal Cooper was telling the truth, and he remembered deciding that Hal Cooper must have been telling the truth, because the story only got him in worse trouble than he was already in. 

“So-called?” Jughead echoed. “You don’t think you have one?” Some people never found theirs, but the general, if unprovable, assumption was that those peoples’ soulmates died before the urges started. The rates of the unmatched tended to be much higher in areas with lower life expectancies. 

“I assume I must. But I don’t want one.” Betty sat up even straighter, looking Jughead straight in the eye. “I know that makes me sound crazy, but I don’t think I am. Look at my family. My sister followed her urges, and she’s had eight kids with our first cousin.” 

“ _Eight_?” 

“Yeah. She’s been pregnant four times, and every time, it’s twins. Jason’s a twin, too, and of course our fathers are twins, so…anyway. Eight kids with our first cousin. My dad followed his urges and he tried to kill his own brother. I saw him do it, did you know that? I was there. I watched him pull the trigger. I was the only one who tried to stop the bleeding. They told me I saved my uncle’s life.” 

All of Jughead’s blood ran cold. “Holy shit.” 

“All of that, and my mom refused to get a divorce, because she and my dad are _soulmates_ ,” she concluded. Her voice was sharp, but steady. “She’s stuck with him all these years. If all of that is what having a soulmate means in my family, then I don’t want one.” 

The urge to rub Betty’s shoulder, to hold her hand, to kiss the top of her head, increased exponentially. But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. 

All at once, Betty seemed to crumple. “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was—I don’t normally tell anyone any of that, let alone someone I just met.” 

“It’s okay. Really.” He took a deep breath, almost tried to make himself smile, and remembered just in time that he had never learned to force a smile without being off-putting. 

“You must think I’m crazy,” she continued. “You must want to shove me out your front door right about now.” 

“I don’t think you’re crazy. Honestly, Betty. I think…” 

What he wanted to tell her was something he would normally never say to anyone. But she’d been honest with him—brutally honest—and she deserved nothing less in return. 

“Okay, I know we don’t know each other very well, but to go through all that and come out like you have? I think you’re probably the strongest person I’ve ever met.” 

This earned him a smile, but a sad one, as Betty’s beautiful green eyes welled with tears. The urge to wrap her in a hug struck him, and it struck him so hard that he could not fight it off. 

Betty was tense at first, but she soon relaxed into his arms. He could feel her breath against the skin of his neck. She smelled very good indeed, though he couldn’t identify any particular scent. 

“Thank you,” she whispered.

  
  
  
  


When Jughead woke, he did not open his eyes at once. He’d fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, he could tell that much. His head and neck were now off-kilter, tilting him sideways in a way that was far from comfortable, and yet, he could not bear the thought of moving. 

Whatever he was using as a sort-of pillow was warm and soft, but too firm to actually be a pillow. It felt more like…well, like a shoulder. 

_Betty’s shoulder._

His hat was off. He opened his eyes, and saw it folded on the coffee table. He had fallen asleep half on Betty, and her response had been to remove his hat, like she was putting him to bed. 

“Shit,” he said, pushing himself all the way up. “Shit. Sorry.” The local news was just wrapping up, so he couldn’t have been asleep for _too_ long. 

“It’s okay, Jughead.” Betty stood up and stretched. “I should go, though. I think we both need to hit the sack.” 

Jughead stood up too, yawning, and grabbed the hat to jam it back on his head. “Another exciting Saturday night in the bag,” he said. “There’s nothing like being in your roaring twenties. Where are you parked? I’ll walk to your car.”

  
  
  
  


Archie did not come to work the next morning. He did not text. There were no voicemails and no missed calls. He did not answer his phone. 

“God damn it, Archie,” Jughead muttered. He banged the oven door shut for emphasis. The strawberry jam tarts could take it. 

Sweet Pea, who was not supposed to have heard the complaint, scoffed. “Too bad you can’t fire the guy.”

  
  
  
  


Archie made his whereabouts known at the worst possible moment, which was to say, he made them known less half a minute after Betty walked through the door. She wasn’t even all the way to the counter yet, but as soon as he saw her bouncy ponytail and giant backpack, he reached for one of the strawberry jam tarts that he’d set aside _just in case_. 

“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” he asked. Betty opened her mouth, but before she could start to speak, Fangs came running from the back with his cell phone held aloft and his expression incredulous. 

“You have to see this,” he said. 

“Fangs, you _know_ our policy on social media during work hours.” 

Fangs gave a sharp _tut_. “This is important. I just got an Insta notification that Archie liked my last photo, see?” He held out the phone, and indeed, Jughead could see that archie.andrews had liked the latest post from almondmilksnake, an artfully composed shot of a red eye and one of Ethel’s everything bagels. 

(He _hated_ that he knew Fangs’s latte art account, even if he recognized the value of a good social media brand.) 

“So?”

“So then I checked my feed, and I saw he’d posted,” Fangs said. “And you’re not going to believe it.” 

Fangs swiped and tapped a couple of times, then propped his phone up against the side of the register so that Jughead and Betty could both see. 

Instantly, Jughead goggled at the screen. “Archie-dot-Andrews, _Paris, France_?” 

“He’s at the Louvre,” Betty said as the video auto-played. Sure enough, there was Archie in front of those glass pyramids, grinning broadly as he held up a red umbrella in the bright sunshine. “What’s he doing at the Louvre?” 

“Give it a minute,” said Fangs. 

“Hey,” said video-Archie, speaking to the camera. “Have you ever had an uncontrollable urge to fly to Paris and stand outside the Louvre holding a red umbrella?” 

“Why, no.” This second voice was sly and female. A moment later, its apparent owner slid into frame, tucking herself under Archie’s arm. She was tiny, and Latina, and she wore very large and expensive-looking sunglasses. “But I have had the urge to fly to Paris and stand outside the Louvre holding a _blue_ umbrella.” 

She lifted her hand, and sure enough, a blue umbrella came into frame. This she spun around as she lifted it up, concealing her and Archie’s faces. When the umbrella dropped a moment later, the two of them were locked into a _very_ deep kiss. 

“Oh, my god,” Betty murmured. 

The onscreen kiss ended, and Archie turned to the camera, wearing his most wholesome grin. 

“Meet Veronica Lodge,” he announced. “She’s my soulmate.”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts when you have the time.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to village-skeptic for looking over this!

_Make a wish to bear_  
_Leave the dead feelings beside the clothes you wear_  
_You got your soul_  
_It’s enough to find love_  
\- Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas, “Tired Oak”

  
  
  
  


The morning after Jughead fell asleep on her shoulder and so unceremoniously drooled on her lavender sundress, Betty woke up feeling refreshed, with absolutely no intention of going to Ninia.

She needed a place to study outside her apartment, though. Left alone at home on a Sunday, which she always was because her roommate Kevin was a personal trainer and spent all weekend at the gym with clients, she knew she would find a million things to do around the apartment that were not studying for her Principles and Practices of Engineering exams. The dishwasher would either need to be unloaded or re-loaded. She had more than one load of laundry to do. Her teeth could use extra flossing. 

And so, after she’d opened her study guides and then left them open on her desk for an hour as she scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom, she packed up her things and went. 

There were a thousand other places she could have gone. Andersonville wasn’t exactly devoid of coffee shops, chain or independent. She could have gone to the library, or trekked down to the shore for some calming (if humid) lake views. 

But while she scraped a grout brush in between shower tiles, while she wiped the toothpaste splatters from Kevin’s overenthusiastic oral hygiene habits off the mirror, while she changed her towel from cream to ivory, she thought about Jughead. More specifically, she thought about Jughead’s reactions to both her awful family history and to her revelation that she didn’t intend to find her soulmate. 

He had handled it well. Surprisingly well. _Astonishingly_ well. 

Betty didn’t tell many people about her family, but she wasn’t exactly shy about doing so when the need arose. Nor was she shy about her determination to stay unmatched. It was always better to be upfront, she believed. Upfront, honest, and forthcoming. Defiant, if necessary. 

Her mother thought this particular determination of Betty’s was ridiculous. So did her sister. It was the only thing they truly seemed to agree on. Kevin, whom Betty loved despite what she saw as his near-pathological need to make public grand romantic gestures, said she was dooming herself to a life of unnecessary misery and loneliness. Even Mary Andrews, who had suffered through the indignity of having a soulmate without being one in return and therefore ought to be more sympathetic, had just tried to set Betty up with her son. 

Jughead, though—Jughead acted like this decision was normal. Rational, even. _“I think you’re probably the strongest person I’ve ever met,”_ he’d said. Not _are you really sure_ or _you’ll change your tune when you meet someone_ or _you’re out of your mind_. 

The idea that someone might agree completely with her assessment of her own life was fairly earth-shaking. 

That such a someone might also seem to possess a lot of the qualities Betty _would_ want in a soulmate (should she want such a thing, which she did not) was even more astonishing. He was smart. He was obviously a hard worker, with drive and ambition. She knew from Mary that he’d insisted on hiring at least some staff with criminal records as part of an effort to reduce recidivism, which struck her as more than worthy of appreciation. He liked at least some of the same things she liked; he also seemed to like her well enough.

Betty thought about this as she changed from her house-cleaning shorts into a pair that didn’t smell of bleach. She thought about it as she freshened her ponytail and applied a light coat of mascara to her lashes. 

“He _would_ have to be cute, too,” she grumbled to her reflection. 

It had been so long since she’d allowed herself anything approaching physical affection. Occasionally hugging Kevin did little to satisfy her yearning for another person’s skin, their hands, their heartbeat. Her own heart had skipped a beat when Jughead somehow managed to doze off and slump over on her, all pleasantly solid and trusting. He didn’t look at all comfortable, but when he let out a little snore, she’d felt the same sort of fuzzy warmth she got from stroking a purring cat. 

His silly wool hat was itchy against her bare skin, so she removed it, revealing even more hair tucked underneath than she’d imagined. Said hair was on the greasy side, and smelled of coffee—no surprises there on either count—but she let her fingernails rake gently across his scalp anyway. 

That was when, with a tiny moan, Jughead began drooling.

Even now, almost twelve hours later, she was still thinking about that—not the moan itself, but the sigh he’d given after, and the pleasant weight of his head on her shoulder. 

All these thoughts combined gave her some of the strongest urges she’d ever felt, confusing ones that swirled and writhed within her. Some of them felt like sexual attraction urges, not soulmate urges; Betty was sure she could tell the difference. Still, she knew she needed to leave the second Jughead woke up. He walked her to her car, and in the warm breeze and moonlight, her mind threw up scenes from a thousand stupid romance novels. _This is the part where we kiss_ , said her subconscious. 

All Jughead said was “Thanks again for the ice cream.” 

Her strongest urge, she now realized, was to run far away and never look back. That would be the safest thing. 

He made no move to touch her, not even to give her another hug, or a handshake. He waited until she was safely inside her car, and then he turned and walked away with a halfhearted wave. 

Buckled safely behind the wheel, Betty felt the most overwhelming sense of relief. Jughead didn’t _know_ anything, or have any urges towards her. He liked her, but as a friend; he wasn’t seeking her out in any way. He was simply a nice, caring person who worked long hours and could probably use another friend. They had, after all, reached an age where it became increasingly difficult to both make new friends and keep the old. 

Her body remembered the weight of his head on her shoulder. Her body urged her to get that weight back. 

But Betty didn’t give in to her urges. Betty always faced her fears. And if she was afraid she might be developing a little unreciprocated crush on Jughead Jones, well, there was only one thing to do about it: face him head on until that little unreciprocated crush burned itself out. 

She started by reminding herself that his name—and not even his given name, but his nickname, a name he did not have to use—was _Jughead_.

  
  
  
  


The coffee shop was about a mile from her house. With the outside temperature still reasonably mild, she decided to walk. Exercise usually helped her focus, and perhaps she could burn off a bit of the nervous energy that hadn’t left her bloodstream since the phone call from her mother. 

Unfortunately, her strategy didn’t work. The closer she got, the antsier she felt. 

She pushed open Ninia’s front door, stepped inside, and found Jughead looking directly at her already, a tiny smile playing at the corners of his lips. 

“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” he said, conjuring a strawberry jam tart out of nowhere. 

Betty’s heart raced faster. She stared him right in the face as she focused on her breath for several counts, _one two three_ , and when she was done with the third breath, she was completely in control of herself again. 

Before she could answer him, Fangs rushed out of the back with wild eyes and Instagram open on his phone. She saw Archie on the screen. She saw Archie at the Louvre, and then she saw a face that was familiar from the fashion magazines she very occasionally read. 

“Meet Veronica Lodge,” Archie declared. “She’s my soulmate.” 

Jughead let out a long, tortured groan.

  
  
  
  


“Relax,” Betty said, the third time Jughead removed his hat, wrung out imaginary water, and shoved it back on again. “I’m sure Fangs has things under control.” 

“I know, I know.” Jughead had spoken perhaps four words on the Uber ride over to Ann Sather, a place whose sustenance he apparently required without delay. (Why Betty had suddenly also begun craving lingonberry jam, she could not say.) He groaned once more, opened the Ann Sather menu and stared blankly for a moment without reading, then closed it again and signaled the waitress. “Black coffee, OJ, two Swedish pancakes with scrambled eggs, side of bacon, side of cinnamon rolls—sorry, Betty, did you know what you want?” 

“Just orange juice and Swedish pancakes for me,” she said, smiling at the waitress. 

She supposed Jughead was on his feet all day and didn’t often get a chance to stop and eat. Maybe this would be his only real meal of the day. Or maybe he wanted to put himself into a food coma so he wouldn’t have to think about Archie and Veronica. Or maybe he was just a gross, weird overeater.

(She mentally crossed her fingers for that last one. The sooner she could build a solid list of potential deal-breakers, the better.) 

“So from what I know of Veronica Lodge—” Betty started, stopping short when Jughead’s expression abruptly changed from annoyed to bewildered. 

“You _know_ her?” 

“No, of course not, I just know _of_ her.” 

“How?” 

That Jughead did not closely follow women’s fashion was…well, it was unsurprising. 

“She owns and runs an up-and-coming little chain of boutiques. _Curates_ is the word she uses in all the advertising. I can’t get her face out of the sponsored posts in any of my social media these days.” 

Jughead scowled rather thoughtfully. “She’s a successful entrepreneur?” 

“I mean, she’s from money, but it seems like her business must be doing well.” 

“And someone like that thinks _Archie_ is her soulmate?” 

The waitress brought their drinks then, along with Jughead’s order of cinnamon rolls. He pushed the plate into the middle of the table and raised his eyebrows. 

“You can’t come to Ann Sather and not have at least a bite of the cinnamon rolls,” he told her. 

“I’ve done it before,” she said, giggling when he put on a look of mock offense. “Okay, fine. I’ll take a couple of bites.” 

She did, and Jughead drank a long, slow sip of coffee as he watched her chew. 

“I know you don’t believe in soulmates,” he said, eventually. 

“I believe they exist,” Betty interjected. “I just don’t want to find mine.” 

“Right. Okay. Which means you’ve thought about them a lot.” He waited for her nod before continuing. “So, in your expert opinion, what is it that makes two people soulmates?” 

“Well, no one knows, do they? It’s like asking what the meaning of life is, or what happens when we die.” 

“Everyone in the world has theories about those things. How many wars have been fought because of them?” Jughead leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on the table. “I can’t imagine you don’t have a theory about why certain people are destined for certain other people.” 

“I don’t,” she protested. “Or, not one that I can test out and prove. And that means it’s speculation, not a proper theory.” 

Jughead snorted. “Science brain much?” 

“Okay, look. Look. Most people jokingly refer to their soulmate as their better half, right? And they kind of believe it. Your soulmate is supposed to make you complete. More than complete. _Happy_. But that’s got to be bullshit.” 

Once again, Jughead surprised her by nodding in agreement instead of telling her she was nuts. “Obviously. If having a soulmate made a person perfectly happy, the world would be full of perfectly happy people. And it’s not.” 

“Exactly,” Betty said, sitting up straighter. “I think—”

“ _A Wind in the Door_.” 

“What?” 

“ _A Wind in the Door_. The sequel to _A Wrinkle in Time.”_

“I know what it is,” she said, forgetting to try not to sound defensive. 

“Meg and Calvin. The book never says so directly, but it doesn't have to. They’re soulmates, right? They have a silent communion with each other. They make each other more them.” The fingers of his right hand drummed lightly on the tabletop. “That’s what I think a soulmate is. A person who makes you more _you_.” 

“I think you can have that with someone who isn’t your soulmate,” Betty countered. “Siblings, parents, friends. You don’t need a soulmate to have an emotional connection.” 

As she said it, the extent to which she _didn’t_ have that with anyone snuck up with insidious quickness and slipped a knife between her ribs. Jughead, apparently oblivious to this development, continued the debate. 

“Of course you can have emotional connections with people who aren’t your soulmate. I have one with Archie. He’s been my best friend for our whole lives. We’re practically brothers.” 

“How do you know Archie isn’t your soulmate?” 

“He’s not.” Jughead slumped against the back of the booth, took his hat off, and wrung it out again. “Some things you just know.” 

They sat in silence until the rest of the food arrived, at which point Jughead inhaled so much so quickly that Betty actually felt nauseated watching him.

  
  
  
  


In a dingy old classroom at her junior high school, a young Betty Cooper learned about tension. 

Or, to be completely accurate—which Betty always liked to be—she learned about tension in _three_ dingy old classrooms at her junior high school. The first was the science classroom. There she constructed arch bridges and bridges out of toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. She learned to manipulate tension, to dissipate and transfer it so that her bridges did not buckle or snap. The second classroom was English, where she learned to manipulate metaphor and simile, punctuation and sentence length, to produce effects in readers and to understand why the words of others produced effects in her. The third classroom was the art room, and though art was one of her weaker subjects, she nevertheless learned to appreciate visual balance and mathematical perspective, and to create a pleasing whole out of disparate elements. 

According to Merriam-Webster, the noun form of the word _tension_ had four meanings. She opened a personal reflection essay in her freshman-year Intro to Psychology class with an extended riff on the first set of meanings, and although her teaching assistant gently commented in the margins that one ought not to open essays with dictionary definitions, she still received an exceptionally good grade on the assignment. 

The dictionary definition of tension was Betty in a nutshell, after all. 

Inner striving, unrest, or imbalance? Check. A state of latent hostility or opposition between individuals or groups? She couldn’t have defined the Cooper family dynamics more efficiently if she’d tried. A balance maintained in an artistic work between opposing forces or elements? Well, that one was more of a stretch—Betty would never describe herself or any part of her life as a work of art, but she certainly was getting adept at balancing all those opposing forces. 

Even her choice of college reflected as much. Northwestern was an excellent school, and its civil engineering program was everything she wanted. Only forty miles separated Lindenhurst and Evanston. At first, when she dreamed of colleges, Betty dreamed of MIT or CalTech or Stanford. She applied to all of them. She even was accepted to some of them. 

But when the time came to make her decision, she realized she could not reposition herself without the shaky bridge that was an imperfect metaphor for her family collapsing completely. Her parents were one set of pillars, Polly was another, and Betty—well, Betty was the cables. Strong but flexible, that was Betty. She had to hold everybody up. She had to hold her family together. She enrolled in the dual BS/MS degree, took extra courses over the summers, and completed her graduation requirements in four years. 

Betty did not buckle, and she did not snap. Betty _stabilized_.

  
  
  
  


Despite all her years of acting as a go-between, Betty was dreading letting Polly know that a date had been set for their father’s release from prison. She thought they would be safe, even if Hal did still have murderous intentions towards Jason or his family; after all, it would be difficult for him to cross the border into Canada. 

Over the years, Polly slowly relaxed her rules about contact with her mother. She now spoke to Alice on occasion, albeit only through lines with no caller ID. She and Jason even brought the kids down to Chicago a few times—one visit after each of the second, third, and fourth sets of twins were old enough to travel. All the Blossoms piled into first one rented van and then another after they crossed the border into the United States, with Jason’s determination to keep both his parents and Polly’s in the dark as to their exact location and living arrangements leading the clan into increasingly convoluted travel itineraries. How they managed to keep the children from telling Alice or Penelope their whereabouts, Betty had no idea. 

They were odd children, which probably accounted for a lot of it. And Jason did most of the talking, as he always had done; once he and Alice got rolling, there was really no point in trying to derail them.

Betty could see bits of both herself and the Polly she used to know in Juniper, the eldest girl. Dagwood, Junie’s twin, was as silent as his father was talkative and frustratingly difficult to read. 

(But then again, it was hard for Dagwood to ever get a word in edgewise. It was hard for _Betty_ to ever get a word in edgewise, and she was an adult.)

The other twins, well… Well, Betty kept telling herself that they were too young to judge. 

Betty stabilized, and Betty faced her fears, and Betty did the unpleasant tasks that were necessary to survival. 

And so finally, a full two weeks after she’d gotten the news of Hal Cooper’s parole, Betty picked up the latest iteration of the burner phone and called her sister in Quebec. She did so from the comfort and relative chaos of the coffee shop, on the grounds that sometimes chaos was more calming than silence, and on the grounds that her sister’s household, which did after all contain eight children under the age of eleven, would be even more chaotic than the chattiest of Chatty Wednesdays. 

The phone rang four times before someone answered. “Hello?” said a child’s voice. “Aunt Betty?” 

“Hi,” Betty replied. “Uh, who is this?” 

“Cypress,” replied the voice, in a tone that implied Betty ought to have divined she was speaking to her second-eldest nephew. 

“And Persimmon,” added a girl. 

“Hi, Cypress. Hi, Persimmon,” Betty said. The Blossom twins were still pairing off, then, she supposed—or at least the eight-year-olds were. She wondered if they were still insisting on being dressed in complementary outfits every day. 

A hand reached into Betty’s line of view—Jughead, coming over to collect her empty mug. _Cypress and Persimmon?_ he mouthed, raising his eyebrows. She nodded, and he muttered a quiet “And I thought my real name was bad.” 

“Mother can’t come to the phone right now,” Cypress told her primly. He had always been prim. “I’m afraid Hawthorn and Oleaster have come down with mild croup.” 

Hawthorn and Oleaster were the youngest twins, about eighteen months now. “Are they at the doctor?” 

“It’s not as bad as that,” said Persimmon. “She’s simply sterilizing the bed linens at the moment. Juniper and Dagwood are out with Father. Would you care to speak with Balsam and Evodia until Mother becomes available?” 

Little as she really wanted to try holding a phone conversation with a couple of four-year-olds, Betty nevertheless agreed. After all, she loved her nieces and nephews—no matter how odd they were. 

A few minutes and several rather overly detailed descriptions of recent dreams later, Polly finally wrested the phone from her offspring. Determined to get the worst part of the call out of the way as soon as possible, Betty decided she would open with her announcement instead of a hello. 

“Polly, Dad’s getting out in a few weeks.” 

There was a brief pause. 

“I don’t care,” Polly said calmly, and then she hung up.

Betty must have been making some terrible kind of face at her phone, because Jughead chuckled when he returned a moment later with the refill she’d only been thinking of ordering. He waved off her attempt to pay for it. 

“I think you’re our best customer at this point,” he said. “Least I can do.” 

Nodding her thanks, Betty studied him for a moment. As she’d expected, the more time she spent at the coffee shop, and the more she talked to Jughead and got to know him, the easier it was to squash down any potentially dangerous feelings. This wasn’t because she didn’t enjoy his company (which she did, very much) or find him attractive (which she also did, very much), but because the development of a friendly rapport made it clear that Jughead didn’t think she was his soulmate. 

If he didn’t think she was _his_ , then she didn’t have to worry that he might be _hers_. She was unspeakably glad to have come to this conclusion, because Jughead was a great guy—he deserved a real soulmate, one who wasn’t afraid to love him the way he deserved to be loved. 

And, on top of that, she had not felt a single strong urge since she’d fought off her urge to run away. Mary Andrews had brought them together, and Mary Andrews was a person. She wasn’t Fate. 

He was about to go back to the counter when Betty asked, “Jughead? What _is_ your real name?” 

Jughead collapsed in the empty chair across from her. He tilted his head, regarding her through two narrowed blue eyes. 

“If I tell you, you have to promise never to use it.” 

“If you don’t tell me,” she countered, “I’ll just ask Archie.” 

“He’s sworn to secrecy. We made a blood oath when we were nine.” 

Archie was loyal, she knew that, but she also would have bet money that she could get him to spill the beans. It wasn’t worth pursuing that now, though. “So I’ll ask Mary.” 

After the deepest of sighs, Jughead twitched his shoulders against the chair back and said, solemnly, “Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third.” 

“Wow.” 

“I know. It’s awful. You see why I’ve never used it.” 

Betty rolled _Forsythe_ around in her mind for the rest of the afternoon. Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third. Oddly enough for such an unusual name, it sounded almost familiar to her. Finally, she realized “Forsythe” was exactly the kind of name that one of the male leads in one of Polly’s old romance novels would have. She giggled to herself then, imagining what it would be like to live in one of those worlds in which your soulmate’s name was written on your skin. What if you had Forsythe—or Jughead, which was probably worse—tattooed on your wrist or your ribcage? 

On the other hand, it would be very easy to find your soulmate, if that were the case. Better Forsythe than Elizabeth, then. 

(One of Betty’s many criticisms of those novels were the complications that inevitably ensued when the soulmates were named things like Katherine and Matthew—nice enough names, to be sure, but how many Katies and Matts were there in the world? Surely parents would give their children unique names to make finding their soulmates easier.) 

Forsythe. 

She decided she liked it.

  
  
  
  


Later that evening, Betty received a return call from Jason, who ranted about Hal Cooper and the United States criminal justice system at such length that Betty put the phone on speaker, threw it on her bed, and folded two full loads of clean laundry before she was required to contribute to the conversation. 

The gist of it was that Alice Cooper was crazy if she thought Polly and Jason would ever come back to Chicago again. 

“He could’ve just texted that,” Betty grumbled to a pile of freshly folded pajama shorts. It was more or less what she’d been expecting, but she felt grumpy nevertheless. Trips to Quebec weren’t easy or inexpensive, and with eight kids plus Jason to deal with, they certainly weren’t relaxing. But they might be the only way Betty ever got to see her sister from here on out. The thought made her clench her fingers into fists. 

Next on her list of unpleasant tasks was calling her cousin Cheryl. She hoped, though, that Jason would do the dirty work for her—assuming the siblings were speaking to each other. Sometimes they weren’t. 

Betty decided it was high time to open that bottle of cheap rosé she’d been keeping in the fridge. 

“I really dislike your brother-cousin that I’ve never met,” Kevin yelled from his own bedroom. “When do I get to meet him?”

  
  
  
  


While a lot of Betty’s work was done from an office, she also found herself outside on sites fairly often. In the middle of summer, the outdoor work could be brutal. 

Today was one of those days. Now, on this Friday in late July, the temperature was over ninety and the humidity was ridiculously high. On top of that, she was on site in Wrigleyville while the Cubs hosted the White Sox. No one, not even Betty herself, would have faulted her for giving into her urge to show up on Jughead’s doorstep with ice cream again—especially not after her roommate, Kevin, texted to report that their air conditioner was on the fritz again. _I’m boiling_ , he wrote, attaching a picture of himself sweating through one of his muscle tees as proof. 

_Great_ , she responded, groaning aloud at both the situation and Kevin, and then, _I’m not in the office today, btw, and I’m not texting that picture to him_. 

(Kevin had recently had his eye on a particularly cute young administrative assistant named Nathaniel, and deeply faux-resented Betty for refusing to set them up.) 

She received an eye-rolling emoji in response, and took that as a cue to put her phone in her bag and leave it there. 

When five o’clock struck, she packed up her things. Filthy, sweaty, she got on the L at Addison and got off it at Berwyn. Then she walked west to Ashland. Her apartment was slightly south, but she turned north, allowing her feet to carry her to the coffee shop that had become so familiar over the last few weeks. 

The storefront next door was suddenly _un_ familiar. No longer abandoned, it now bore a city construction permit and a sign proclaiming it the future home of the newest Monica Posh boutique. There had been a big announcement a few days ago. Apparently, Veronica was already debating between Chicago and Seattle for her third storefront, and the discovery that her soulmate was Chicago-based had not so much tipped the scales as toppled them over completely. _Williamsburg, Melrose, Andersonville_ read a banner in the window. 

As usual, Jughead was looking at her even before she stepped through the door; she’d decided there must be some sort of silent alarm or security camera of which she wasn’t aware, alerting him to her impending presence. It was the only explanation. 

“What happened to you?” he said, immediately beginning to prepare the ice water she had not yet requested. 

“Nothing in particular. Just a long day on site, that’s all. And now apparently my apartment’s air conditioning is dead.” She paused a moment, considering, and then raised an eyebrow at him in what she hoped looked like a mocking sort of scowl. “Why, do I look that bad?” 

“No.” Jughead slid the ice water over the counter, and she took a few grateful gulps before speaking again. “Just overheated.” 

“I thought you were supposed to leave earlier today,” she said. 

He shrugged. “Me too, but it somehow didn’t happen.” 

The coffee shop wasn’t particularly crowded at the moment—her favorite table was open, as it always seemed to be—but she didn’t pursue the issue further. Jughead had hired a few more people since the night he passed out on her shoulder. But he was still working more than any one person should, especially considering that Archie’s impromptu trip to Paris had lasted only a few days. Archie’s discovery that his soulmate was both ferociously sophisticated and ferociously intelligent seemed to have given him a renewed sense of purpose in life. According to Jughead, Archie was working almost as much as he was these days, coming in earlier and staying later, and frequently reiterating that he needed to “make himself worthy” of Veronica. 

She didn’t see Archie now, though. This wasn’t much of a surprise; she knew he had been doubling down on his music career as well. 

“Which is kind of unfortunate,” Jughead continued. “For once in my life, I have plans.” 

“Oh?” Betty raised her eyebrows as she wrapped her lips around the straw again. 

He nodded. “It seems Veronica Lodge is finally deigning to grace the Second City with her presence.”

“I saw the storefront,” Betty said. 

“Yeah, that’s a thing that’s happening now. So Archie wants to introduce me. My attendance is required at some kind of cocktail bar.” 

“What’s wrong with cocktail bars?” Betty wondered, though she felt like she might have a reasonably good guess already. 

“What _isn’t_ wrong with cocktail bars? They’re crowded, they’re noisy, the drinks are overpriced, you never know what kind of food they’re going to serve—” 

“Jughead, what year do you think we’re living in? I’m sure you can at least look up a food menu on your phone.” 

“I have to go home and change _and_ I have to stay out late,” he concluded. “You’re a smart woman, Betty. Tell me, please, why Veronica couldn’t have just come here, if it’s so urgent that she meet me? If she’s really Archie’s soulmate, she’s going to be seeing a lot of this place anyway.” 

“Maybe she wanted to meet on neutral ground,” Betty suggested, although everything she had ever read about Veronica Lodge suggested that the woman would be at ease in nearly any setting that permitted the wearing of high heels. 

“All so I can be a third wheel with the lovebirds.” Jughead shook his head briefly, then pulled himself together. “Well, it’s not like this will be the first time. Iced decaf vanilla latte, Betts? I just had Sweet Pea finish up a new batch of the Madagascar simple syrup.” 

As she watched Jughead pull the decaf shots for her iced latte, Betty was struck with the sudden urge to do something nice for a friend. 

_No_ , she told herself strictly. _Stop doing everyone’s emotional labor for them._

“So where are you guys going?” she asked. “What bar, I mean?” 

He shrugged. “Some place called Bordel. I’ve never heard of it. All I know is that it’s all the way in Wicker Park.” 

Betty _had_ heard of Bordel, and she’d only heard good things. It was modeled on a Prohibition-era speakeasy. The cocktail menu was supposed to be excellent, and the atmosphere even better. 

It had been a very, very long time since she had permitted herself a night out, and the thought of doing so now made her almost giddy. She could take a cool shower and pin up her hair. She could slip into that slinky little dress she’d bought on clearance months ago but never found an occasion to wear, and those silver sandals that made her legs look ten miles long. She could drink something cool from a fancy glass and forget about her apartment’s broken air conditioning. 

_Doing other people’s emotional labor keeps you from having to do your own_ , said the little voice in her head, but then she told herself _It’s not emotional labor if it’s fun_ , and decided her point was a good one. 

“One iced decaf vanilla latte,” Jughead announced. He slid the drink over to her and turned back to the register, where a newly arrived customer was scanning the overhead menu. 

“Hey, Jug.” As he raised a questioning eyebrow at her, Betty permitted a slow smile to bloom across her face. She widened her eyes as much as possible, too, just for good measure. “How would you feel about having a little company tonight?”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I'd love to know your thoughts when you have a moment. ❤️


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sullypants and skeptic deserve all the awards.

_Tendons like we all_  
_Tendons stretched too far_  
_Tumbled overnight, rewinding steady_  
\- The Joy Formidable, “Tendons”

  
  
  
  


Across a fine china tea set—a _fine china tea set_ , of all things, in a bordello-themed speakeasy—Archie’s latest and greatest soulmate tipped a quizzical eyebrow at the woman Jughead was very much beginning to wish he could call his own. 

“So if you don’t intend to find your soulmate,” Veronica said, “does that mean you don’t date at all?” 

Veronica was even tinier in person than she appeared on Instagram. Pint-sized. Pocket-sized. Jughead had a distinct feeling that if she ever heard him describe her in such terms, he would be castrated with a single withering look. When you sat down with Veronica Lodge, you understood at once how she could have convinced Archie that they were soulmates. In fact, Jughead doubted she’d even had to try. She was utterly unlike any of Archie’s previous girlfriends, and that in itself would be enough to draw Archie to her. 

This was as much conscious opinion on Veronica as Jughead had been able to form, for two reasons. The first reason was that, a mere half-teacup into his first Southside, he was feeling the slightest of buzzes. 

The second reason was Betty Cooper, who strode through the speakeasy’s doors looking like sex on legs not long after Jughead and Archie’s arrival wearing a little blue dress that covered her like liquid, revealing all her curves (and her collarbones, _god_ , her collarbones) without being skimpy. He watched her scan the space for the briefest of moments, her eyes lighting up when they landed on the correct booth. Before Jughead could pick his jaw up off the floor, she’d arrived at their table on legs that he could swear were a good six inches longer than they had been that afternoon. 

“Hi,” she said, sliding into the booth. “Thanks, Juggie.” 

It was only then that Jughead realized he’d stood up to welcome her. He slid back in, next to Betty, but stayed as far to the edge of the booth as he could, resisting the urge to let his thigh oh-so-naturally press against hers. 

“You must be Veronica Lodge,” Betty continued, extending a hand across the table. 

Veronica’s dark eyes twinkled, or Jughead thought they did; he was too busy trying not to stare at the back of Betty’s neck, bare and elegant and obviously sun-kissed even in the dark speakeasy. 

“And you must be Betty Cooper.” 

“Jug, pour Betty a drink,” Archie said, kicking Jughead’s leg under the table. 

Betty accepted a teacup and saucer. “Which of the punches is this? The Southside?” 

“Indeed it is,” Veronica said. “Have you been here before?” 

“No, this is my first time. I was just looking at the menu on my way over.” 

Veronica’s smile went from politely inquisitive to something more genuine. 

“I like a girl who does her research,” she said, lifting her teacup. “Cheers.”

  
  
  
  


It took only thirty minutes for Veronica to get to that question about Betty’s dating life, or possibly the lack thereof. As soon as it was out in the open, Betty frowned. She didn’t hide behind her teacup, but she did worry its handle for a moment before responding. 

The pause seemed to inspire Veronica to elaborate. “Because, pardon me if I’m reading this situation the wrong way, but when Jughead informed us there would be a fourth party, I did rather _assume_.” 

Betty now placed her cup very precisely on its saucer and began worrying her lower lip between her teeth instead. She picked up the teapot and refilled all their drinks, pouring so much into Jughead’s cup that only the miracle of surface tension kept it from spilling over. 

Would his soulmate, he wondered, be able to divine that he very rarely drank? Would his soulmate be able to sense his family history of substance abuse, or his fear that he’d inherited his father’s urges for—he couldn’t resist using the slang, considering this bar’s theming—the sauce? Could soulmates sense those things, or was this simply another sign that he and Betty were not meant for each other? 

“No,” Betty said, calmly. “Jughead and I are just friends. And to answer your other question, I guess I’m not completely averse to the idea of casual dating. For other people. I just don’t really see the point in me dating, you know? If I don’t want to find my soulmate, I’m not going to do anything that makes it more likely to happen.” 

Carefully, Jughead picked up his teacup. He drained half of it in one long, slow sip. 

“Anyway, Jug doesn’t date either,” Archie contributed, and Jughead drained the other half of his drink.

  
  
  
  


He was not sure exactly how much time had passed or how many drinks he had consumed when he tried to stand up. It was hard to tell when they came in a teapot, and when everyone else at the table kept topping off all the cups. 

He did know a few things. 

He knew that Veronica fit precisely under Archie’s arm, and that she already had an easy, even polished, way of talking up his good points, as though Jughead might never have noticed them before. He knew that he hadn’t heard Archie’s laugh sound so warm in years, or possibly ever. 

“Our meeting just felt like—like manifest destiny,” Archie told them. 

“That’s not what that term means,” said Betty and Jughead in unison. Their eyes met, briefly, and then Betty looked away, her chin held high. 

He knew that a grand total of eleven times tonight, either he or Betty had accidentally touched each other—a brush of the legs under the table, a misplaced elbow grazing the other’s ribs—and each time, Betty had apologized and pulled away, even when the contact had not been her fault. 

Although he didn’t know how many drinks he had imbibed, the answer seemed to be too many. Jughead wasn’t _drunk_ , or at least he wasn’t drunk like his father used to get drunk, but the walls of the speakeasy were definitely starting to swirl in ways they shouldn’t. This was despite the fortification of fancy Spanish hams and cheeses that the four of them had mutually demolished. 

(A hot dog from a street vendor would’ve been preferable, but he had the feeling Veronica Lodge would rather die than dine anywhere with fewer than two Michelin stars.) 

He knew that although he could afford to pay his portion of the bill, he was still terrified of seeing it. And he knew that Archie, Veronica, and Betty were all willfully refusing to understand the important contributions that _The Hateful Eight_ made to the contemporary landscape of the Western genre. 

Betty, in fact, was beginning to look like there were several other places she would rather be at the moment than in his vicinity. Suddenly abashed, Jughead said “Excuse me,” and succeeded in pushing himself fully out of the booth. 

When he returned from the men’s room, he found Betty had also left the table. A glass of water sat at his place. 

“Hydrate,” Veronica ordered. “You’re a little green around the gills.” 

“I’m fine,” he grumbled. 

“You’re not fine, Jug,” Archie said. “You look terrible.” 

“Thanks, Archie. Thanks a lot for that.” 

“I’ve called a driver for you,” Veronica informed him, more curtly than he appreciated being informed of such a thing. 

“I can order my own Uber.”

“Not an Uber, a driver. And it’s done. Archibald will accompany you home, and I’ll see Elizabeth safely back to her abode once she returns from the ladies’. You’ll go to bed, and you’ll sleep all this off—”

“I’m not _that_ drunk.” 

He felt Archie’s arm land on his shoulder. “No, Jug, you’re not that drunk. But you’re exhausted. You just dozed off in the middle of yelling something about Jennifer Jason Leigh.” 

“While expectorating bread crumbs and quince paste all over the table,” Veronica added. She had apparently handled the check at some point, because she was now placing a platinum credit card back into her tiny handbag and signing a receipt before standing up. “So Archie will take you home, and you’ll stay there. You’re taking tomorrow off from work. We’ll handle things ourselves.” 

This both sobered and awoke Jughead completely. “You’ll _what_?” he spat. 

“I know how to do everything,” Archie insisted. “I know how to do the pastries.”

“We also need to talk about the shop’s management, when you’re sober and well-rested,” Veronica added. “I’ve been looking at your books, and they’re well-handled, but you simply cannot keep doing everything yourself.” 

This, somehow, felt like a worse betrayal than Archie absconding to Paris. “You showed her our books?” 

“Well, yeah. She’s my soulmate. And she’s a more experienced businesswoman than either of us are.” Archie said this as though he was explaining it to a small, stupid child, and Jughead’s blood heated up another few degrees. 

A faint, and faintly annoying, look of amusement crossed Veronica’s face. “Archie, you didn’t tell me your friend was so belligerent when he’s tipsy.” 

“I’m _not_ belligerent,” Jughead protested. “I’m being honest.” 

Veronica’s nostrils flared in a way that felt patronizing. “ _Honestly_ , at the very least, I’m going to insist you follow my recommendation to use a payroll service.” 

“Archie, this is _by far_ the most—” 

“You’re taking tomorrow off,” Archie said. “Veronica and I will open.” 

“Oh, come on,” Jughead spat. “You and Veronica opening the shop? What does some spoiled Park Avenue heiress—”

“Excuse me?” Veronica folded her arms over her chest, her voice now so icy cold that a trickle ran down Jughead’s spine. What line he’d just crossed, he wasn’t sure, but he was certain that he had in fact crossed one. “I’ll have you know that just because I come from money doesn’t mean I take it for granted. Yes, my parents gave me some help getting Monica Posh off the ground. But I know how to work. I waitressed all through high school, and I tended bar through college. I’m sure I can handle your precious espresso machine for a day without things going totally awry.” 

“Ronnie,” Archie started. She swatted the air behind her once, and Archie immediately shut up. 

“Besides, it’s not as though the two of you started entirely from scratch. I’ve seen how much Archie’s mom put in.” 

Betty chose this precise moment to return from the restroom. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?” 

“Sorry,” he mumbled, shaking his head. This did not return his brain to its normal place, but merely caused it to wobble around in his skull, precarious and jello-like. 

Veronica looked only slightly mollified. Archie’s brow remained furrowed in concern. Betty, still fresh as a daisy, merely seemed confused. 

“For what?”

“And for everyone’s sake, wash your hat,” Veronica told him. “It’s shedding coffee grounds all over the floor.”

  
  
  
  


The car Veronica ordered for them was huge and black. It came with a smooth leather interior and a uniformed driver whose expression did not change when Jughead suddenly began feeling very green around the gills indeed. With the help of a rolled-down window, he kept everything together until they got back to their apartment on the lower floor of Mary’s brownstone. A childhood of cheap, processed, often expired food (and, he suspected, his own stubborn constitution) had given Jughead an iron stomach, but he could already tell that the Southside punch was about to overwhelm it. 

Archie—dumb, loyal, wonderful Archie—unlocked their front door, guided Jughead to the bathroom, then placed Jughead’s hat on edge of the bathroom sink and smoothed his hair back as they sat together on the cool tile floor. 

“Let it all out,” he advised, wrinkling his nose only slightly at the sudden reappearance of _jamón íberico_. “I’ll get you some water when this is over.”

  
  
  
  


He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this bad. The flu-like symptoms he’d endured in his sophomore year of college, maybe. It was a very different kind of bad than the other contenders for the worst he’d ever felt—times with the Serpents when he’d been beaten within an inch of his life. The day his mother left with Jellybean. His father’s sentencing. 

“I’m sorry about tonight,” he said, in between rounds of heaving. 

“It’s okay.” 

“Not really.” He swallowed. “This was a big deal for you. I shouldn’t have been an ass to Veronica. Tell her that for me tomorrow.” 

Archie handed him a towel. “You should tell her yourself,” he said. 

They sat in silence for a long time before Jughead could work himself up to his next words. 

“I don’t want to be like my dad.” 

“You’re not, Jug.” Archie sat up a little straighter. “I’ve known you your whole life, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen you drink enough to throw up.” 

“It’s only the second time I’ve ever been drunk enough to throw up.” 

“When was the first?” Archie sounded almost offended that he hadn’t been there, or maybe that he was just now hearing about it. 

“With the Serpents,” he muttered. “When do you think?” 

“College?” Archie shrugged, then turned pensive. “You know, I always forget you were actually in a gang. It seems like such a different… everything, I guess.” 

Jughead contemplated this while he wiped sweat from his face. His head started to throb, matching the throbbing that he’d been feeling in what he suspected might be his soul ever since he laid eyes on Betty in that little blue dress. Or maybe since Betty had knocked on his door with ice cream. Or maybe, even, since Betty first walked through the doors of Ninia and asked for the restroom key.

“I really like her, Arch.” 

If Jughead’s life was a movie, Archie would smile sympathetically and say “I know.” He might put his arm around Jughead’s shoulder while he did it. He might have additional words of wisdom, like “There are other fish in the sea,” or “Let’s hatch a plan to make Betty change her mind!” 

But Jughead’s life wasn’t a movie, and so instead Archie knitted his eyebrows together. 

“Really? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Jug. I’m glad you like Veronica. It just didn’t seem like you two were getting along.” 

As he leaned back over the toilet, Jughead decided he really ought to just keep all his feelings to himself.

  
  
  
  


Jughead woke the next morning at seven, shooting upright in a state of panic. He swung his legs out of bed, stood up, and immediately tripped over a plastic bag-lined bucket, which rolled halfway across the floor. It was, thankfully, free of vomit. His insides had finally stopped evacuating themselves around one o’clock. He remembered that now. He remembered that he wasn’t three hours behind schedule. He was taking the day off. 

A full six hours of sleep was no match for the hangover headache currently pounding through his brain. He got up for just long enough to relieve himself and down a full glass of water from the bathroom tap, and then he crashed back into bed and did not rise again until almost noon. 

Saturday mornings tended to be on the lighter side, since there were fewer people stopping in on their way to work. Jughead kept telling himself this as he puttered around the apartment, sipping orange juice and intermittently scowling at the note Archie had left on the kitchen table: _DO NOT COME TO NINIA,_ in very big Sharpie letters. _WE WILL HAVE THINGS UNDER CONTROL._ They must have done, because no one had called him in a panic. He kept telling himself that, too. 

Underneath Archie’s directive was a smaller, hastily scrawled message reading _Our dads are coming to meet Veronica. Should be here tomorrow afternoon._

Both their dads? Fred coming made perfect sense, or at least it did if one really believed Veronica was Archie’s soulmate. But why would FP be accompanying him? If he was coming to see Jughead, why hadn’t he just told Jughead so himself? 

He’d brought home some leftover pastries yesterday, and he was grateful for that now, since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been grocery shopping and there was no way in hell he was going to subject himself to one of Archie’s protein shakes. He selected a couple of cheese danishes—they tended to be greasy the second day, that would be good right now—and stuck them in the toaster oven, debating whether he wanted to brew himself a pot of Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe magic elixir, or leave his still-tender insides alone for the time being. 

In the end, of course, he made the damn coffee.

  
  
  
  


Having a day off with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one relying on him to be anywhere or do anything felt very strange indeed. Having a day off with a _hangover_ felt borderline intolerable. 

Since Jughead’s solution to most of life’s problems had historically been to bang away at his laptop until his mind felt suitably purged, he tried doing that. He opened up the Word file he hadn’t touched since Christmas, and read over the last bits he’d written. 

He closed the file. 

He opened the file. 

He repeated these actions for nearly an hour before he slammed the laptop shut.

Maybe a walk would clear his mind. It was another scorcher outside, according to his phone, but maybe that was a good thing. Maybe he could sweat out the last of his hangover. 

His hat was still on the edge of the bathroom sink. 

He decided to leave it there.

  
  
  
  


The walk to Women and Children First wasn’t a short one, and by the time Jughead got there, he felt not only very sweaty, but very sunburned. At least he’d thought to pull an old t-shirt on over his undershirt, so his shoulders were okay. 

“Welcome,” called the woman behind the counter when he walked in. “Can I help you find anything?” 

Jughead could not remember the title of a single book on his to-read list (or, for that matter, the last time he had even sat down to read), and so he said, “Just browsing for now, thanks.” She smiled and nodded, and he disappeared into the fiction section. 

In Jughead’s youth, a lack of funds had compelled him to use the library; as a still-poor college student, he’d begun to frequent used book stores. Buying a paperback new still felt like an indulgence; buying a hardcover new was a downright luxury. 

Truth be told, he didn’t even always _like_ reading new books. Old books had their comforting smell, of course. Worn, yellowed pages were comforting, too. Other people had taken these words in before him. Misanthropic though he might be (or perhaps solipsistic was the better word) reading old books thus gave Jughead a sense of connection to something greater than himself. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he found interesting marginalia. A book could be a sacred object. Churches gave Jughead anxiety. Bookstores and libraries brought him peace. 

Today, yellowed old pages would not do. Today he wanted pages that were fresh and crisp, like a good fall apple. Today he needed the reminder that making something of himself had once meant standing in a place just like this one, holding a clean, tightly bound book with _J. Jones III_ printed on its spine. 

Despite the heat that clung to the surface of his skin, despite his still-lingering hangover, he was able to easily slip into that peace now. At the end of the first aisle, his heart rate slowed. At the end of the second aisle, there were two paperbacks tucked under his arm and the river of sweat running down his spine had slowed to a trickle. 

At the end of the third aisle, he ran straight into Betty Cooper. 

“Hi,” she said. Miraculously, she was smiling. Was she really happy to see him, he wondered? Or was she just being polite? 

“Betty,” Jughead replied. 

She was sweaty, too, but in a way that looked somehow intentional. She wore gym clothes—a snug tank top and tiny mesh shorts—and had a small duffel bag and a rolled-up yoga mat strapped over one shoulder. 

“My roommate’s a personal trainer,” she said, as though she needed to explain her outfit. “He gets me into his gym for free sometimes.” 

“No hangover, I take it?” 

Betty winced. “A little, this morning. Veronica and I actually ended up staying at Bordel until closing.” 

“Wow.” 

“I know, right? We talked a lot. It was nice. Although she says she feels like destiny intended us to be friends, which is kind of weird. I mean, _Archie’s_ her soulmate, and it’s not like Archie and I are close. He didn’t even know I was coming last night.” Betty shrugged, then narrowed her eyes slightly. “Are you okay? You seemed...not great, when you left.” 

“Yeah, I’m fine.” This was, suddenly, true. Jughead’s hangover had somehow dissipated completely. “I drank a little too much, that’s all.” 

“You don’t drink very often, do you.” Betty stated this as a fact, not a guess.

“Nope. My dad—he’s sober now, but for most of my childhood, he drank a _lot_.” 

“So you don’t,” she said, looking thoughtful. “No wonder you didn’t want to meet Veronica at a bar.”

  
  
  
  


Despite his lingering need to apologize to Veronica, Betty would not allow him to go to Ninia. 

“For one,” she said, as they headed out with their purchases, “it’s your day off. For another, she’s not there anymore.” 

“And you know this how?” 

Betty looked slightly guilty. “I, uh, may have stopped by for an iced latte after I went to the gym. And a cheese danish. Kind of defeats the purpose of going to the gym in the first place, I know.” 

“Oh, yeah?” Jughead raised his eyebrows. “How’d Archie do?” 

“He did well,” she said reassuringly. “They were fine. Not as good as yours, of course, but—fine.” She paused for a moment. “Actually, he had a bandage on one hand. Something about not being able to find the oven mitts. But he swears he’s okay.” 

Jughead chose to ignore the information about the oven mitts. “I guess you’re not hungry now, huh?” 

“A little,” Betty said. “It’s getting close to dinnertime, and the air conditioning in my apartment is broken. I could be talked into going somewhere with you, if you want.” 

They found themselves at a diner, and though Jughead knew Betty would never consider this or any other time they spent together a _date_ , he could not stop himself from wishing that one day, she might.

  
  
  
  


He returned home to find an envelope bearing a Bennington, Vermont return address in his mailbox, addressed to him. The envelope was thick, cream-colored, and embossed with blood-red ink. 

Jughead could not think of a single person he knew in Bennington, Vermont. The envelope didn’t look like junk mail, though, so he slid a thumb under the flap as soon as he was through the front door. 

_Ms. Cheryl Blossom and Ms. Antoinette Topaz request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their marriage_ , it began. Mid-October. A small, private sort of cabin-like retreat somewhere in the mountains. 

He called Toni at once. 

“You’re getting married?” he demanded. 

“Hi to you too,” Toni replied. “How long has it been since we’ve even texted, Jones? Six weeks?” 

Jughead sighed. “Yeah, probably. Which is my fault, I know. But—you’re getting married? I’ve never even met your girlfriend.” 

“Uh, _soulmate_ ,” Toni corrected. “And whose fault is that? You haven’t been to Riverdale in, like, two years.” 

“True. But you only met Cheryl four months ago, so even if I’d gone back for Christmas last year—” 

“And we’re soulmates,” Toni proclaimed. “Why wait? Cher’s starting a new job this fall, super exciting, so we’re moving to Bennington—well, she’s already there. I’ve still got some shit to wrap up here.” 

“Some shit to wrap up there,” Jughead echoed, a bit weakly. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the idea of Toni, the fiercest and most opinionated person he’d ever met, seemingly dropping her entire life to take on someone else’s. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Toni said. Jughead was sure her arms were folded over her chest right now, and her right hip sticking out. The posture was practically audible. “It’s not like that. We met because of Cheryl’s work, you know? She was driving through here on her way to Bennington, and her car broke down.” 

“What’s she do in Bennington?” Jughead asked, realizing he knew absolutely nothing about Cheryl beyond the fact that she looked rather like a human Jessica Rabbit and was, apparently, marrying Toni. 

“Not _in_ Bennington, _at_ Bennington. The college. She’s a poet, and she got a two-year visiting professorship. It’s a huge deal, Jug, the _prestige_...” 

Silently, Jughead resolved to go back to Women and Children First in the next couple of weeks. They sold that kind of book. Maybe if he tried to read some of Cheryl’s poetry, he would understand.

  
  
  
  


A couple of weeks ago, Archie had rocked Jughead’s world by jetting off to Paris and returning with Veronica. On Saturday, Toni had rocked it with her abrupt wedding announcement. 

On Sunday, Jughead stared open-mouthed across the pizza boxes on their kitchen table, and wondered if his life—if this whole soulmate thing—could _possibly_ get any weirder. 

“Wait.” Even in that one word, Archie’s voice shook, and that was a relief to Jughead. He was not the only one shaken by this news. “You guys—you two—”

Next to Archie, Veronica clapped her hands. “You’re soulmates!” she chirped, entirely too delighted for someone who had never met either man before. “And to figure it out after all these years? _Swoon_. Congratulations, you two.” 

She beamed at the two of them, at Fred Andrews and FP Jones, and clapped her hands again. 

“A toast,” she said, reaching for her bottle of root beer. “To Fred and FP.” 

“To us,” said Jughead’s father, grinning roguishly at Archie’s father. He held up his root beer, using the hand that was _not_ gripping Fred’s thigh.

“To us,” echoed Fred. 

There was a clink, and then Jughead’s dad and Archie’s dad kissed each other. 

On the mouth.

Passionately.

  
  
  
  


“The thing is,” Fred told them, after Archie and Jughead had finally managed to pick their jaws up off the floor, “we always knew. Always. It just took us this long to admit it to each other.” 

“When?” Jughead said faintly. “When did you decide to…” 

“Right after we got back from helping you fix up the shop.” FP grinned at Fred. “Actually, not even. We road tripped here, you remember? Only made it as far as the first motel we stopped at before we finally got on with things.” 

“You always knew?” Archie echoed faintly. “Dad, what—but _Mom_.” 

Mary, who had since been called down to the boys’ apartment, shook her head. “Archie, you knew I wasn’t your father’s soulmate.” 

“No, I know, but I didn’t think Dad was…” He seemed not to want to say _gay_. 

“I’m not attracted to _men_ , Archie,” Fred said gently. “Just FP. It’s always just been FP. I’ve known since junior year of high school.” 

At this, Jughead snuck a glance at Archie. They had barely ever mentioned that one incident to each other, but _now_ , well. Archie was sneaking an equally furtive glance at Jughead, and in that moment Jughead knew both that Archie was thinking the same things he was thinking _and_ that there were some things Archie had still not told Veronica. 

“So why did it take you two so long to…” Jughead threw up his hands in a gesture that he hoped meant something to someone. 

“I wanted a wife and a kid. That was how I’d always imagined my life.” Fred looked at his ex-wife, and smiled. “I loved Mary very much. I still do. We just didn’t work that way in the end. And frankly, I didn’t _want_ my soulmate to be FP. Even then, he was starting to get into trouble. Still, even after he joined the Serpents, I was going to tell him. It took me nearly until our graduation to work up the courage. But then—” 

“Then I up and disappeared,” FP interrupted. “I always kinda let everyone assume that my old man kicked me out because I joined a gang, but that’s not true. He kicked me out because I told him Freddie Andrews was my soulmate.” 

Veronica tutted at that. “I’ve never understood the existence of homophobia,” she said. “If Fate tells you that you should be with another person, what does it matter which gender they are?” 

Fred gave her a thoughtful nod. “Well, it shouldn’t, Veronica. But it did to FP’s dad. After all, not all soulmate relationships are sexual. We could have been platonic soulmates.” 

“But ours is.” 

“ _Dad_ ,” Jughead groaned. “ _Literally no one_ asked.” His father grinned (again? Still? FP had not stopped smiling since he’d arrived, Jughead now realized) and waggled his eyebrows. Jughead groaned again. 

“So FP joined a gang, and then he joined the Army, and by the time he got back to Riverdale, I’d met Mary,” Fred continued. “And I thought maybe I was wrong about FP being my soulmate. It’s hard to believe someone’s meant for you when they up and disappear for a few years.” 

“And then I met Gladys,” said FP. “Your mom’s everything I would have wanted in a soulmate who isn’t Fred, boy. I hope you know that.”

“Dad, what does that even _mean_?” By now, Jughead was sure he looked like one of the many memes he hated, the one with complicated math equations swirling around people’s heads. 

“It means don’t turn to alcohol to numb your feelings for your soulmate,” FP said. “Shit. Freddie was right to stay as far away as he could for all those years I didn’t have my act together.” 

The six of them sat in silence for a few moments. Finally, Mary spoke. 

“I think I knew,” she said. “I think I always did. I’m happy for you two. Really. This is wonderful news.” She stood up, as did Fred, and they hugged each other tightly. 

In a muffled near-whisper, Jughead heard Fred say, “Thank you, Mary.” 

In a much louder whisper, FP leaned over the arm of the sofa, and said “By the way, Jug—you probably figured this out already, but I moved in with Fred. Sold the trailer.” 

Even though this made perfect sense, and even though Jughead had very few fond memories of his childhood home, the news still stung. 

“Have you told Jellybean?” 

“Not yet. We wanted you and Archie to be the first to know. Well—second. Pop Tate guessed it right quick.” 

“Of course he did.” 

“And yes, I’ve got your coffee in my bag,” FP added. “Anyway, don’t say anything to your mom or Jelly, okay? This kind of news oughta come from me.”

  
  
  
  


Jughead lay on his back in bed that night, one of the books he’d chosen yesterday (at Betty’s urging) tented open on his chest. 

Archie had found his soulmate. Toni had found her soulmate. His father had found his soulmate, sort of; the word “find” didn’t really seem to apply very well to that particular situation. Jellybean and Pranav had been going strong for five or six years at this point. 

Without bothering to close the book first, Jughead rolled over and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. Before he could overthink things, he hit dial on a number that had been added only yesterday. It wasn’t too late. She would still be up. 

“Jug?” 

“Hey, Betty,” he said, as butterflies unexpectedly erupted in his stomach. “Do you have a minute?” 

“Oh my god, yes,” she said, at once. “You interrupted a terrible call with my mom. Can you have some sort of crazy emergency that demands my immediate undivided attention?” 

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” Jughead quipped. 

He could almost believe he felt Betty smile.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bordel](https://www.bordelchicago.com/) is a real place, and honestly, the gift that kept on giving. A speakeasy that offers a punch called the Southside? Served in a tea service? Bless. 
> 
> [Women and Children First](https://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/) is also real, and not a Portlandia sketch. (Support local independent feminist bookstores, y'all!) 
> 
> I promise I am catching up on review replies! Even if I don't respond right away, please know that I appreciate every comment, no matter the length ❤️


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **sullypants:** it spiraled out of control, etc.  
>  **stillscape:** they're the house words for a reason
> 
> (thank you also to village-skeptic, as always)

_I'm gonna go where my urge leads no more_  
_Swallowed waist-deep in the gore of the forest_  
_A boreal feast, let it finish me, please_  
_‘Cause I revenge myself all over myself_  
_There's nothing you can do to me_  
\- Neko Case, “Night Still Comes”

  
  
  
  


Though today was only Thursday, this already felt like the worst Labor Day weekend of Betty’s life. 

Her mother’s request for her to come home the weekend her father was released from prison had morphed into a request for Betty to actually accompany her to the prison to pick Hal up on Thursday morning. 

This, Betty refused to do. 

But regardless of how many times she squeezed her long-tortured office stress ball, or repeated “I’m a grown woman, I don’t have to do something just because my mother asks me to do it” under her breath, she still found herself packing her bags on Wednesday night so she could load them into her car after work on Thursday and head up right after she’d eaten dinner. 

To be sure, the possibility that Alice was nervous about seeing her would-be murderer husband out of prison for the first time in a decade and wanted moral support for the occasion was a small one. But slim odds were better than none. And even though Betty _was_ a grown woman, and _didn’t_ have to do everything her mother asked, showing up for the family still felt like her duty as a daughter. 

She wished her boss was less understanding about her using sick days when she was not, in fact, sick. Then again, every time she thought about coming face-to-face with a father who wasn’t safely on the other side of a Plexiglass wall, she felt sick anyway. So maybe it wasn’t a stretch of the truth to call her absence a sick day. 

“Good luck,” Jughead told her, as he handed over the iced vanilla latte she was counting on to get her through the fifty-mile drive. Additional thoughts seemed to be crossing through his mind. Betty noticed that his lips were slightly parted, and for a wild instant she imagined that Jughead was going to offer to come with her. If he did offer, she wondered, would she accept? 

No. That was crazy. They’d barely known each other for two months. 

For another, wilder instant, Betty imagined _inviting_ him to come with her. That was even crazier, though. 

“What are you up to this weekend, Jughead?” 

He shrugged. “Working.” 

For some reason, this answer caused her to deflate. What other answer could she possibly have expected? 

“That’s it?” 

“Veronica’s finally taking Archie to New York to meet her parents, and a couple of the kids who usually work weekends are out with family stuff.” He shrugged. “Someone’s gotta cover those shifts.” 

_Does it always have to be you?_ Betty wondered, even though she knew Jughead had significantly cut his hours since the arrival of one Veronica Lodge and her Harvard Business School acumen. As far as Betty could tell, the two didn’t much enjoy each other’s company. But she knew Jughead had apologized for getting rip-roaring drunk at the nightclub, and Archie had apologized for bringing Veronica into their business without consulting Jughead first, and none of that seemed to matter so much after the news that Archie’s dad and Jughead’s dad were soulmates knocked everyone flat. 

“You’re a good boss, Jug, you know that?” 

Jughead turned away as though embarrassed by her praise. 

Or maybe that wasn’t why. 

“Got a little something for you, by the way.” He turned back to her with a brown waxed paper pastry bag in his hand. “Somehow I wound up with a tiny bit of extra filling for the jam tarts and a cheese danish that didn’t have quite enough cheese, so...one strawberry cheese danish.” 

Betty frowned, unable to put her finger on why this felt weird. She took a sip of her latte. It was perfect, as always. She took a bigger sip, enough to give herself a tiny bit of brain freeze. Then the answer came to her. 

“Thursday isn’t a strawberry jam tart day.” 

This time he didn’t turn away, though his eyes flicked to the floor. “Not usually,” he said, to his combat boots, before looking up. “Are you going to be okay this weekend?” 

“Yeah. Well… honestly, no. Not really. But I’ll get through it. I’ve been through worse.” 

Jughead cracked a smile. “Call me if you need anything,” he joked.

“Will do,” Betty replied, knowing full well that she could never subject an innocent bystander to the mess that was her family.

  
  
  
  


As she drove, she couldn’t help but think about her cousin Cheryl, and Cheryl’s apparent lack of compunction in the same department. Despite being the sole other family member whom Polly and Jason trusted completely, Betty had never become close with the first cousin she’d discovered only at the age of fourteen. Sometimes this felt like a failure on her part. More often, it felt like the natural consequence of Cheryl’s, well… Betty was yet to find a better word for it than _Cherylness_. 

Maybe the sensation she felt in her chest every time she thought about the wedding invitation, those blood-red letters beseeching her to be present for the union of Cheryl Blossom and Antoinette Topaz—maybe that unpleasant sinking feeling, that ache—maybe she was more surprised that Cheryl had found a soulmate than she was perplexed at Cheryl’s willingness to roll with it. Who was this Antoinette Topaz, anyway? Betty didn’t know a thing about her, aside from her name and the fact that she was willing to marry Cheryl. 

Of _course_ Cheryl’s soulmate had a name like “Antoinette.” Of course she did. Betty couldn’t help but make the association with Marie Antoinette, the only other Antoinette that came to mind, and for several lonely miles she amused herself with the image of Cheryl and her blurry, faceless fiancée in those enormous French gowns and wigs. If you couldn’t reappropriate “Let them eat cake” for a wedding reception, she wondered, when could you? 

All of it seemed apropos. Betty still had a painfully visceral memory of the very first time she’d ever met her cousin. Fourteen years old, she’d stood in front of her full-length bedroom mirror in her new, rather modest pink bikini, her mind running concurrent checklists of every perceived flaw and empowering rebuttals of every self-critical thought. She was going to a party at the lake house owned by Polly’s new boyfriend’s family—Polly’s _soulmate_ , or so she claimed. 

(Betty was reserving judgment on that.)

She was probably going to be the youngest one there. The line between dumb little kid and cool little sister seemed to be only the width of a spider’s silk, and equally fragile. But Polly, eager to take advantage of her brand-new driver’s license, was calling her, and there was no time left to reevaluate her choice of swimsuit. She pulled a t-shirt and shorts on over the bikini and raced down the stairs. 

Cheryl was not the very first person Betty saw when they rounded the corner of the house, but she was the person who drew Betty’s eye. Sun gleamed in equal measure from her cascading red tresses and her poreless, hairless, flawless pale skin. Next to Cheryl’s lounge chair was a cherry-red drink that matched her fingernails, her toenails, and her swimsuit. Hidden behind a combination of wide-brimmed hat, oversized black sunglasses, and enormous leather-bound edition of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ (in French, even), her expression was impossible to discern. Nevertheless, Betty was certain that if she could see this girl’s eyes, they would be full of disdain—for this lakeside summer shindig, for life in general, and for Betty in particular. 

Polly marched them right over. “Cher, this is—” 

A string of incomprehensible French spilled from Cheryl’s ruby-red lips. Betty couldn’t even pretend to understand. She’d always taken Spanish. 

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Betty, Polly’s sister.” 

Cheryl Blossom sighed deeply and removed her sunglasses. She did, indeed, seem disdainful. “ _Enchanté_.”

Betty didn’t have to speak French fluently—or at all—to understand _that_. 

Her relationship with Cheryl had never really changed. She knew her cousin didn’t hate her; she suspected her cousin didn’t even dislike her. There was simply something between the two of them, some indefinable energy, that compelled Cheryl to constantly try to claw her way under Betty’s skin with those cherry-red fingernails. 

The wedding was the weekend after she took her licensing exams. The RSVP card was on its way back to Vermont. If nothing else, it would be a rare chance to see Polly and the kids. She was sure Jason would never miss his sister’s wedding.

  
  
  
  


Alice greeted Betty in more less her usual fashion: standing in the open front door with a glass of white wine in one hand and the other hand on her hip. Typically, she was still in work clothes even at eight o’clock; tonight, she was dressed down somewhat, in summer linen slacks with her feet bare. Still, her right eyebrow arched in suspended judgment as she evaluated how well her daughter was handling her baggage alone. 

Tonight, a second person emerged from the house’s interior. Unlike Alice, Hal Cooper did not leave his daughter to fend for herself. He marched right down the front steps and towards Betty’s car. 

“Well,” he said, holding out his arms. With a sinking feeling, Betty realized there was no real way to avoid being hugged. “If it isn’t my favorite daughter.” 

“Dad.” As Hal embraced her, Betty’s voice was only slightly less stiff than her body. “Welcome home.” 

On the whole, Betty’s father was not much of a hugger. A quick embrace when she’d skinned her knees as a small child, sure. She’d sit on his lap as he read auto repair manuals or stamp collecting guides to her. But once she and Polly were slightly older, the physical affection they received from their parents felt perfunctory at best. 

Once Betty was slightly older than _that_ , she was able to recognize that on some level, Hal was simply attempting to never do anything that might be perceived as inappropriate. He’d succeeded, she thought, right up until he tried to murder his twin brother. And, of course, she had not made significant physical contact with her father since his sentencing. 

Prison had not improved Hal’s hugging prowess. Whether this was good or bad was not something Betty cared to think deeply about. Good, she supposed; the hug didn’t last long. 

As soon as he released her, she bent over to grab her suitcase handle. 

“No, no, honey. I’ll get your bags.” 

“I can take them,” Betty insisted. He was already wresting the suitcase from her grip, though, and she decided to save her strength for fighting other, more pressing battles. 

“Hi, Mom,” she said. 

Her mother embraced her as well. This hug was lukewarm, one-armed, and felt familiar and alien at the same time. Then they moved to stand next to each other, Hal’s arm instantly finding Alice’s waist, their shoulders mutually squared to their daughter. It was the pose they affected in every family portrait ever taken. It was like they’d never stopped practicing. Betty hadn’t seen her mother so relaxed in years. Her hair wasn’t even perfectly coiffed; it was messy, as though… 

Well, as though they’d spent the afternoon making up for ten years with no sex. Betty barely kept herself from gagging at the realization. 

“Elizabeth. So glad you were able to get the time off.”

“Your mother and I are so grateful,” Hal added.

“Of course.” Betty tried to smile at her parents. She failed. She tried a second time. It felt forced. She tried harder. 

“I have your bed all made up,” said Alice. “You’ve eaten, I assume?” 

“Yes.” 

“Good. Take your things upstairs and then come sit with us for a while. I haven’t seen you since Mother’s Day.” She paused for a moment, scanning Betty with her usual critical eye. The feeling of being looked at in such a way remained paradoxically unsettling and comforting. “You look well.” 

For once, Betty thought, it didn’t sound like a backhanded compliment.

  
  
  
  


Alice Cooper believed in big breakfasts, modest lunches, light dinners, and wine in lieu of bedtime snacks. 

Common sense told Betty Cooper that she shouldn’t drink at all. Tonight was a night to keep her wits completely about her. What if she needed to make a quick getaway? Besides, she’d never been one to use alcohol as a coping mechanism. Alcohol was likely to lower her defense against any urges she might have. Her mother poured her a glass, but she took only a single polite sip from it, preferring to observe her father with clear eyes. 

In prison, Hal had been angry, not seething with rage so much as blustering with it. His complaints were the hot air of a self-righteous middle-class white man whose mind had long been an immovable object. Now, though, he seemed almost exactly as he had been in Betty’s childhood. Hal’s physique remained that of a corn-fed Midwesterner, though he was slightly thinner now. His skin remained free of tattoos—at least, that Betty could see—but it was paler, grayer, exactly what one would expect of a man who rarely saw sunlight and had been denied a decade of access to the high-end skin care products he favored. 

The anger seemed to have gone, now that he was a free man. But the self-righteousness—that, Betty thought, was still there. 

Her parents sat next to each other on the couch. Hal put his non-wine hand around Alice’s shoulder; Alice rested her non-wine hand on Hal’s thigh. 

“It’s so good to be back at home with my family again,” Hal said. 

Alice smiled. “It’s good to have you back, darling.” 

“All of us together again.” 

“Except for Polly,” Betty cut in. 

It was like Betty had dropped a small iceberg into the room. 

“You’re not going to start that again, are you?” asked Alice. “She made her choices. We’ve made ours.” 

Betty would never be able to comprehend how her mother had chosen a would-be murderer over her own daughter. She would never be able to comprehend _why_ her mother had chosen that way. She refused to even try. 

“Mom.” 

Abruptly, Hal got to his feet. “Now, girls,” he said—calmly. Rationally. Paternally. 

_Paternalistically._

Betty’s blood boiled, and she was struck by the urge to simply grab her bags and drive straight back to Chicago. Instead of giving in, she clenched her jaw shut and left it that way until her father resettled himself on the couch. Politely, they discussed Betty’s career, her upcoming exams, her roommate. They discussed Hal’s return to work, and Betty learned that the local paper had agreed to hire him back on a part-time basis, which would give him time to work on a tell-all memoir about his time in prison that she already knew she would never want to read. 

They did not discuss Polly. 

At the end of his second glass of wine, Hal leaned back against the couch cushions. “You know, Betty,” he said, “I was surprised when your mother said you’d be coming alone this weekend. I really thought you would have found your soulmate by now.” 

Betty took a second sip of wine, then a third. It was very warm now, and sour on her tongue. 

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

  
  
  
  


As a child, she was forbidden to bring food into her bedroom. As an adult, she figured she could get away with it, and as an adult in this particular situation, she didn’t really give a damn either way. She changed into her pajamas before carefully extracting the strawberry cheese danish from where she’d tucked it inside her purse. Miraculously, it had survived the journey intact, with its pink-and-cream swirls just as pretty as they had been at the coffee shop. They matched the wallpaper. Jughead couldn’t have planned it any better if he’d tried. 

For some reason, this thought made Betty’s chest ache. 

He had done something nice for her. Now she wanted to do something nice for him. 

Betty smoothed out a Ninia-branded napkin on the corner of her nightstand and placed the pastry on top. Unfortunately, doing so obscured a good portion of the logo. She thought for a minute, then took a calculated bite—just enough to reveal the coffee mug with its three-pronged crown. 

“Oh my _god_ ,” she muttered. Had she ever tasted anything better? It was possible that she had not. 

The composition of her photo didn’t seem quite right. Even with the busy wallpaper in the background, the frame was too empty. She scanned her bedroom for appropriate props, and soon located a pink faux peony, a couple of well-used yellow No. 2 pencils, and an old Nancy Drew hardcover. After a self-satisfied nod at her new arrangement, she turned on the bedside lamp. Then she snapped a few photos, selected one, and fiddled with various filters while she inhaled the rest of the danish. 

Finally, she just sent Jughead an unedited version with the caption _How’d you know this would match my childhood bedroom décor?_ Although she was fairly certain Jughead hated emojis, she added a smiley face. 

Jughead didn’t respond right away, so she brushed her teeth and washed her face before she checked her phone again. 

No texts. But it was nearly midnight. He must have gone to bed. 

She triple-checked that the door was locked before climbing into her childhood bed. There she lay on her back with her eyes closed tightly but the bedside lamp still on, willing herself to fall asleep. 

There was a light tap at her door. “Good night, honey,” said both parents in unison. 

“Sweet dreams,” added her father. 

When she finally fell asleep, Betty did not have sweet dreams.

  
  
  
  


She woke the next morning with a pounding headache that had nothing to do with her three sips of wine and everything to do with the prospect of having to get through this day, and then the next, and then the one after that… 

She also had three texts on her phone. The first read _Damn, Cooper. Putting Fangs’s latte art account to shame._ The second read _So how was it?_ , and the third, _And how are things with your dad so far?_

 _Put it on the menu permanently,_ she wrote back. _And… I survived the first night._

Jughead didn’t respond, but she didn’t expect him to. She knew he didn’t keep his cell phone in his pocket at work.

  
  
  
  


“My favorite,” Hal said, when Betty’s mother brought an immense stack of chocolate-chip pancakes to the table. 

“Did you leave any of them plain for me?” Betty asked, and both her parents turned their heads to her with expressions full of wonder, as though they were hearing Betty did not like chocolate chip pancakes for the first time. 

Hal began buttering his pancakes. “You know what I’d like to do today? I’d like to go to the lake.”

“If that’s what you want to do, Hal, of course.” Alice turned to her daughter. “How does that sound, Betty?” 

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit.” 

“That’s fine,” Alice replied. “I’m sure we can find you something.”

  
  
  
  


Back in her bedroom, Betty stood staring at the lone swimsuit she’d been able to find in the small collection of old clothes that still remained in the closet: the very same pink bikini she had been wearing when Polly took her to the lake to meet the Blossoms. It lay there on her bed, faded and sad. What was modest on her at fourteen would, she suspected, be downright scandalous now—assuming she could even get it on, of course. 

There was a light tap on the open door, and Betty’s mother poked her head in. “Did you find what you needed?” 

“I don’t think so,” Betty said. “But I can just go in shorts. I don’t need to swim.” 

“Nonsense, dear. You can wear one of my suits.” 

Betty expected her mother to come back with a small assortment of mom-style suits for her to pick from, but that did not happen. She had forgotten, it seemed, that Alice Cooper never missed an opportunity to prove she could still wear whatever she wanted, and look damn good doing it. 

“What _is_ this?” Betty muttered to herself when she was alone with the lone suit her mother had brought her. It was a one-piece, but a one-piece with a very low v-neck and an even lower scoop back, and rendered in a low-sheen metallic snake print. She snapped a picture of it to send Kevin, with a _Look at this bathing suit my mother’s lending me._

Kevin wrote back at once: _You know your mom’s still crazy hot, right?_

“Ew,” Betty said to her phone. It didn’t matter how gay Kevin was; the fact that he had an opinion on her mother’s body still seemed gross. 

The two suits sat next to each other on her bed, horribly symbolic of this whole weekend: here she was, in her childhood home, seemingly without choices other than reverting to adolescence or turning into her mother.

Then she undressed and pulled on her mother’s suit. She took a deep breath and stepped in front of her full-length mirror. 

It was the sexiest she’d ever looked in a bathing suit. 

“Ew,” she said again. 

She pulled on an old t-shirt and shorts over the suit, jammed her feet into flip-flops, and went downstairs. 

At the lake, they staked out a spot with towels and chairs. Betty settled down with one of the novels she’d bought when she ran into Jughead at the bookstore. Alice flipped her hair over her shoulders, then stepped out of her cover-up to reveal that she had given her daughter the _less_ revealing bathing suit. 

Worse, Betty realized, was the fact that her mother’s back, stomach, and upper thighs were evenly tanned. She had gone to a tanning salon, or gotten a spray tan, or sat in the backyard, or something. She had _prepared_ for this. 

Hal wolf-whistled. “I married well,” he said appreciatively. 

“Worth the wait?” Alice asked. Betty held her book up to her face, hoping to conceal her disgusted expression, but it wouldn’t have mattered much. Her parents were regarding each other with the kinds of looks normally only seen on hormonal teenagers, and ignoring her completely. Before long, they were knee-deep in the lake, splashing each other and giggling. 

Behind her book, Betty rolled her eyes. 

Her phone buzzed. Jughead. He’d sent a picture of an unknown blonde woman sitting at Betty’s favorite table. The words _Something’s off here_ followed, and then, _Everything still okay?_

 _Are you supposed to take stealth photos of your customers?_ she wrote back. _We’re at the lake. It could be worse._ She flipped the book around and propped it open across her bare knees, cover visible so Jughead would be able to see it was the one he’d recommended to her, and sent a picture. 

He didn’t respond until an hour after Ninia closed: a shot of his socked feet propped up on his coffee table next to an ice cream sundae. _You know what? This isn’t as good as the one you made. I’m gonna need you to show me your secret sometime._

Betty snorted lightly at the picture. _The secret is to not wave your stinky feet around your ice cream_. 

“No texting during dinner, please, Elizabeth,” said Alice. 

“That’s right,” Hal chimed in. “Dinner is still family time.” 

Betty put her phone in her pocket. Her parents then proceeded to talk only to each other for the rest of the meal.

  
  
  
  


The whole weekend played out in much the same way: Betty’s presence was required, but mostly ignored. Her opinion was sought, but not heeded. 

Had her father really changed? She couldn’t tell. Her parents were horny as hell, though. At first, this made Betty exasperated; who wanted to think about their own parents having sex? But soon after that, she found herself infuriated. 

_Look at what I did_ , she wanted to scream at both of them. _Look at the choices I made while you were being selfish. You two chose each other over Polly, and Polly chose Jason over you, but me—I chose not to let anyone else get involved in this mess._

“Dad?” she ventured, on one of the few occasions she found herself alone with him. They were in the living room, neither of them paying attention to a muted baseball game on the television. “Can I ask you something?” 

He was reading the newspaper, which he now lowered so he could regard her through horn-rimmed reading glasses. Hal had not worn reading glasses before, and Betty wondered when he had acquired this pair—were they prescription, somehow? Had her parents stopped off at the drugstore for some simple magnifiers on their way back from the prison? The thought that Hal’s first act as a free man might have been to acquire reading glasses struck Betty as being so normal that it was downright weird. 

“Of course, honey.” He removed the glasses, folding them expertly with one hand. “Anything.” 

“It’s not an easy question,” she warned. 

Hal merely raised his eyebrows. “I’m listening.” 

“Are you going to try to kill Clifford again?” 

“ _Betty!_ ” hissed her mother’s voice suddenly, from behind her left ear.

“It’s fine, Alice. I’m surprised Betty didn’t ask sooner, in fact.” 

He took a moment to fold the newspaper completely, then folded one ankle over the other knee and rested his hands atop it. He smiled at her, the blank paternal smile—the _paternalistic_ smile—that made Betty’s spine tingle. 

“I am not,” he said. “Not unless Clifford becomes a threat to us again, of course.” 

Spending a lifetime alone was the right choice. She knew it was the right choice. But as she sensed her would-be murderer father and enabling mother making eyes at each other from across the room, as she took deep wracking breaths in bed that night to keep herself from breaking down in tears, all she could think was: _If I’m the only one who made the right choices, then why am I the only one who seems to be unhappy?_

  
  
  
  


She left Lindenhurst just after breakfast on Monday, with yet another half-serving of chocolate chip pancakes churning uneasily in her stomach. Her parents waved her out of the driveway, coordinated but not matching, and looking for all the world like they’d come straight out of whatever catalog sold the preppiest middle-aged clothes these days. 

It took only an hour to get back to Chicago. She wanted to unpack her things. She wanted to throw all her clothes into the in-unit washer at once; they wouldn’t make a full load, but they smelled like her parents’ house now, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to bear it. 

She wouldn’t be able to bear sitting at home alone, either. Kevin would no doubt be out with clients, and she wasn’t in the mood to hit the gym. Everyone else she might count as a close enough friend was probably still enjoying the end of their long weekend. 

She _could_ use a cup of coffee.

  
  
  
  


During her drive home, Betty had consumed a full thirty-two ounce bottle of water in the hopes that doing so would flush her system free of anxiety. This strategy had not worked, but other parts of her body certainly felt flushed. Therefore, the first thing she did upon entering the coffee shop was ask Sweet Pea for the restroom key. 

On her way to the restroom, she discovered Veronica studying the framed review of Ninia that Betty had read on her very first visit here. 

“Let me get your opinion on something, Betty,” Veronica said, without turning her head. 

“Veronica, hi. I thought you and Archie were in New York.” 

“We blew back into the Windy City last night. I’ve had an idea. That space next door has _so_ much square footage for the amount of product I intend to stock. Now, I could push the Monica Posh brand past its current aesthetic, or…” She stepped back, folded her arms over her chest, and looked Betty in the eye at last. “I could take advantage of that extra space in a new and exciting way. Monica Posh _pour homme_.” 

Betty never had gotten around to learning French, but she understood this well enough. “Menswear?” 

A dismissive, perfectly manicured hand waved in Betty’s direction. “I’ve already decided on that. No, I want your opinion on using...let’s say nontraditional models.” 

Betty felt her brow furrow. 

“The boys,” Veronica clarified. “These hot baristas. It’d be _such_ good branding, wouldn’t it? Fangs and Sweet Pea have the most fascinating tattoos, and—well, I imagine you haven’t seen Archibald shirtless, but you wouldn’t believe the abs on that man. Once you see them, you’ll know them anywhere.” 

“I guess the worst that can happen is you ask them to model and they say no,” Betty ventured, unsure as to why her opinion was necessary. Veronica’s mind seemed made up.

“I predict three of them will say yes and one will say no. That’s where you come in.” 

“Excuse me?” 

“Sweet-talk our little Forsythe for me, won’t you?” Veronica smiled, a lithe black cat preparing to tuck into the most delicate of canaries. “You may not be together, but I still have the feeling that boy would do anything for you.” 

“I doubt that,” Betty said, chuckling a little. “But you know what? He might not work here, but my roommate, Kevin—he’s a personal trainer.” 

“Is he cute?” 

Betty nodded. “Cute and built. His biceps are probably the size of your head. I bet he’d love to try his hand at modeling. And he’s gay,” she added. “So you’d be getting the neighborhood LGBT-friendly vibe in there, if that matters to you.” 

“Inclusivity always matters, Elizabeth. Very well.” Veronica gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Send me a good picture of him when you have the chance. But I also have a particular image in mind that requires someone long and lean, so could you be a dear and talk to Jughead anyway?”

  
  
  
  


When Betty emerged from the restroom, Veronica was nowhere to be seen. She returned the restroom key to Archie, who had joined Sweet Pea behind the counter. 

“Where’s Jughead today?” she asked, though she had no intention of bringing up modeling for Veronica’s clothing store at this particular moment, or possibly ever. “I thought he was working all weekend.” 

“He was,” Archie told her. “But Veronica and I sent him home after he made the pastries this morning. It wasn’t really fair for me to leave him alone all weekend.” 

Veronica’s voice came ringing from the back. “Jughead needs to learn to take breaks,” she called. “And show off his arms more.” 

“Anyway,” Archie said. “What can I get you today, Betty?” 

Betty looked over the menu—not like she needed to, but it was a habit—and realized she didn’t want coffee at all. She wanted to go home, pull the covers over her head, and sleep for a week. 

She ordered an iced vanilla latte anyway, just to be polite. 

“For here or to go?” Archie asked her. 

Betty thought for a moment. “To go.”

  
  
  
  


The drive from Ninia to Mary Andrews’ brownstone should have taken ten minutes at most. Technically, it was walkable; she knew both Jughead and Archie often _did_ walk it. But today, the universe seemed to be conspiring against Betty getting there. 

She hit every single red light. She had to wait two cycles to get through a left turn with no arrow. She got stuck behind a bus unloading not one, not two, but three elderly wheelchair users at a single stop, and she couldn’t get around it before the _next_ stop, where it picked up a bicyclist who had difficulties attaching her bike to the front rack. She had to pull over for a fire truck. Two cars got into a mild accident at a four-way stop, and this, too, impeded Betty’s progress. 

The ten-minute drive took her nearly thirty minutes, and once she finally made it to the correct street, she had to circle five different blocks to find a parking spot. As soon as she got out of the car, she was nearly mowed down by a GrubHub driver. 

With every obstacle thrown in her path, Betty’s confidence increased. She was not blindly following an urge; following urges was supposed to be easy. No, she had made a decision. 

She marched up the front steps of the brownstone and rang the doorbell for the downstairs unit. 

Jughead’s voice came through an open window. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any.” 

“It’s Betty,” she called back. 

The door opened just a few seconds later. Jughead stood there in an old t-shirt and older jeans, barefoot and hatless, his expression somewhat unreadable. 

He swallowed once. “What,” he said, “no ice cream?”

  
  
  
  


She felt a tiny pang of guilt when she saw the open laptop on his coffee table. 

“Were you working?” She knew he’d been trying to get back into writing. “Sorry. I should’ve texted before I just showed up.” 

Swiftly, he shut the laptop. “It’s fine. I wasn’t making much progress.” 

The question she could tell Jughead wanted to ask, _Why are you here?_ remained unspoken. This was probably for the best; Betty wasn’t sure she had a coherent answer at the ready. 

Instead, he said, “So you survived the weekend.” 

“I did.” 

“How was it?” 

Betty took a deep breath, and as she did, she also took in Jughead more closely. He _was_ long and lean, and his t-shirt was well-worn to the point of being shrunken, almost clingy. His arms were lightly tanned, and the muscles in them twitched slightly as he stood. She knew those muscles came from the physical work of running a coffee shop and bakery, not deliberate exercise; the slight paradox of that pleased her. There was a small hole at the collar of his t-shirt, just enough for her to catch a glimpse of skin. Despite his casual attire, and despite his lack of hat, Jughead was still wearing his usual complement of leather bracelets and too many rings, and— 

Letting out her breath, Betty also let herself understand both why she had come and why she was now fixating on Jughead’s upper body. 

She drew her eyes up to meet his. 

“I could really use a hug,” she said.

  
  
  
  


Jughead did her one better. He sat on the couch and gestured for Betty to join him, then pulled her close against his chest and held her there, gently stroking her back while she unburdened herself. Betty’s heart had been hammering full speed for what felt like the entire long weekend; she could feel Jughead’s going at the same accelerated pace, matching hers beat for beat until gradually, together, their pulses slowed to normal. 

She shifted a little, snuggling closer, and Jughead made a small noise of contentment that she did not think he had intended for her to hear. 

“Anyway,” Betty said. “How was your weekend?” 

He scoffed. “You know exactly how it was. I was at work almost nonstop until seven this morning.” 

“Was business good?” 

“Yeah, it was. We did well.” 

“That’s good,” she said. “I’m glad one of us had a good weekend. You deserve it.” 

In the ensuing silence, Betty became aware—hyper-aware, even—of Jughead’s heartbeat accelerating once more. She felt his breath hitch. 

“Jug? Is something wrong?” She pushed away, turning around so she could look at him, and tried to ignore the way her body instantly ached at the loss of contact. 

Jughead appeared to have recently sucked on a lemon, or perhaps a unicorn Frappuccino. “You know you deserved to have a good weekend too, right?” 

For some reason, this made Betty want to cry. “No, I know. But it’s fine. I’m fine. But—thank you, Jug, for saying that.” 

“Can I ask you something?” 

Every single one of the warning klaxons in Betty’s mind began blaring at top volume. _RUN AWAY_ , they warned her. _RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY_. And so, of course, she stayed put. 

Then she did the warning klaxons one better. She swung her leg over Jughead so that she straddled his lap. 

“Betty?” he asked, and though his voice nearly wobbled, his hands were confident and steady around her waist. 

_RUN AWAY_ , yelled her brain. Instead, she kissed him. 

One of Jughead’s hands slipped up her spine, right to the spot between shoulders where she carried the most tension. He pulled her closer, kissing her back like both their lives depended on it. 

And, for what felt like the very first time, Betty Cooper’s mind was simply quiet.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, I'm still catching up on review replies on the last chapter--but please know I have read and appreciated every single one, and I would love to know what you thought of this chapter, too!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sullypants and village-skeptic deserve all the hats.

_Oh, no, I’ve said too much_  
_I haven’t said enough_  
\- R.E.M., “Losing My Religion”

  
  
  
  


That night two months ago, when he accidentally crashed Mary Andrews’ attempt to set her son up with Betty Cooper, Jughead listened to Betty Cooper spill her life story. He’d told her that he thought she was the strongest person he’d ever met, and he meant it. He’d wondered then if there was any glimmer of a possibility she might be his soulmate, and the better he got to know her, the stronger that possibility seemed. 

Or did it? As he told himself that first night, you were supposed to _know_. And he still didn’t know. Hope wasn’t the same as knowledge. You couldn’t wish something impossible into being. You had to work for it. 

Like that pipe dream about being a published author he’d been carrying around for as long as he could remember. He wasn’t a published author yet because he had stopped working at it. He had been putting all his efforts towards his other, more practical dream of financial stability. The stories he wrote in his head while he pulled shots of espresso or creamed butter and sugar together until fluffy—well, they were still there, in his head, and he was having a devil of a time getting them out. After hours in front of his computer, he had accomplished only two pages of assorted, disorganized notes and one very long (and very irrelevant) Wikipedia research spiral. So when Betty showed up at his door to ask for a hug, he was all too happy to take a break. 

Of course, he would have been happy to stop writing and give Betty a hug even if the definitive Great American Novel was about to spring forth from his fingertips. He would have been happy to stop whatever he was doing and give Betty a hug even if he was unaware that Betty was unwinding from a particularly hellish weekend. 

She seemed as though she could use something stronger than a hug, and so Jughead could easily convince himself that his uncontrollable urge to sit with her on the couch, hold her against his chest, and rub her back was for her benefit, not his. He was right. As Betty talked and Jughead listened, their heartbeats synchronized. 

Then she asked how _his_ weekend had gone, and he told her: he’d spent nearly the whole time at Ninia, which had done good business. 

“That’s good,” Betty said. She was still curled against him, and seemed in no hurry to move. “I’m glad one of us had a good weekend. You deserve it.”

  
  
  
  


Late one afternoon, but still early in the winter that Jughead was six years old, his dad pulled their ancient, rusty truck up to the trailer and honked the horn. 

“Come on out here, boy,” he yelled, over the still-running engine. “Got something for you.” 

FP almost never got drunk before dark, so Jughead shoved his arms into his jacket and ran eagerly down the front steps, letting the door slam behind him even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to. 

He found his father standing in what counted as their driveway, holding a boys’ bicycle that Jughead could tell was slightly too large for him. It seemed even more ancient and even rustier than the truck. 

“Got a real good price on this. It’s all yours. ‘Bout time you learned to ride a bike.” 

The bicycle did not have training wheels. But that was fine. Jughead didn’t need them. 

“I already know how,” he piped up, eager to show off his knowledge; his parents didn’t praise him often, but when they did, it was because he did something smart. 

FP’s eyes narrowed. “That so?” He stepped back. “Who taught you?” 

“Mr. Andrews.” Jughead had ridden a bike earlier this afternoon, in fact; Archie always let him have turns. Not the fake kind of turn, either, the ones you knew the other kids were only giving you because their parents made them share. Archie liked to give Jughead turns. They’d circled back and forth in the Andrews’ driveway for almost an hour after school before Archie’s reading tutor arrived and Mrs. Andrews told Mr. Andrews to drive Jughead home. 

Whether this was the right answer or the wrong one, Jughead couldn’t tell. His father’s face became blank, unreadable. 

“Of course Freddie would.” The unreadable blank expression resolved into an unreadable grin. “Okay, then, boy. Show me what you got.” 

Mr. Andrews would have made Jughead wear a helmet, but none seemed to be forthcoming from FP, so Jughead simply clambered onto the overlarge bike as best he could. His feet barely reached the pedals, but he could do this. He knew he could. Gritting his teeth, he set off. 

At first, the bike wobbled alarmingly, but he soon set it right, pedaling harder and faster and thus gaining more balance on the rough Sunnyside gravel. Over the wind rushing in his ears, he heard his father let out a loud whoop. His heart thumped fast and true. This, Jughead knew, was the closest he could come to flying. Faster and faster he went. Blood pumped through his veins, and oxygen through his lungs. He felt alive. 

The end of the lane approached. Jughead gauged the length of time he could wait before braking, then—wanting his turn to be spectacular—waited a second longer. He hit the brakes hard. But this bike’s brakes were not like the ones on Archie’s bike. Archie’s bike braked smoothly. First, this bike’s brakes hiccuped. Then they didn’t seem to work at all. Then they seized, and Jughead’s spectacular turn ended in a spectacular crash. 

Tears stung Jughead’s eyes, but he would not let them fall, not even when his father came running over with tears in _his_ eyes. 

FP’s tears were tears of laughter, though. “Show-off,” he chortled. “Look where that got you. Gravel in your chin and a hole torn in your pants. You hurt?” 

“No,” Jughead spat. 

Once he realized Jughead wasn’t seriously injured, FP started laughing even harder. 

“Well, boy,” he said, “whatever all this mess is, you deserve it.” 

Jughead was sure that he did not. Under the oversized gray knit hat he’d found in the back of the closet when the weather started to turn, the hairs on the back of his neck bristled. 

Then FP stuck out a hand to lift Jughead to his feet. He walked Jughead back to the trailer, cleaned the gravel out of his chin and his knees and the heels of his hands, and took him to Pop’s for dinner. For once, he even allowed Jughead to get a milkshake _and_ dessert.

  
  
  
  


When he was ten years old, Jughead found himself full of fourth-grade righteous anger over having to spend every recess period avoiding bullies. Sure, he lived in a trailer park and wore a secondhand jacket that was never quite warm enough. Sure, he was on the reduced-fare lunch plan. So what? What right did that give Reggie, or Moose, or anybody, to— 

Well, today he hadn’t managed to avoid them. Archie would’ve helped defend him, but Archie was home sick today. Besides, he needed to stop relying on Archie for so much. As his mom kept saying, it was about time Jughead learned to stand up for himself. 

A bruise was blooming on his side, he was sure of it, but the air was too cold for him to pull up his shirt and check. The bruise had been made worse by the library book tucked inside Jughead’s jacket, which hadn’t cushioned the blow Reggie’s fist at all. Rather, Reggie’s fist had driven the hardcover’s corner straight in between two ribs. 

“Getting beat up by your own book?” Moose shouted, when the bullies realized what had happened. “Nerd. You deserve it.” 

Jughead was sure that he did not. 

But, seeing no other exit strategy, he simply swiped a cuff over the dirt on his face and stalked around the corner of the school. There he tucked himself into his usual spot on the other side of one of those metal mesh trash cans. No one ever came looking for him here, and at this time of year, the trash didn’t smell much. 

Now, shaking with a combination of fury and cold, he reached not for the library book inside his jacket, but for the book of matches he’d swiped from the kitchen table that morning. What he’d intended to do with them at the time, he couldn’t say. 

He lit one match, holding the cardboard between index finger and thumb. He wondered how far down he could let it burn before he couldn’t take the heat any longer. 

He didn’t find out. The match blew out before the flame was anywhere near his fingertips. 

He lit a second. It too blew out at once. 

He lit a third, then a fourth. There were a dozen matches left, and one by one, Jughead ripped them from the book and struck them across the sandpaper on the back cover. 

Eleven matches blew out. No harm, no foul. 

A spark from the twelfth match flew into the trash can, as if it had been drawn there by some mysterious force. 

He didn’t know much about the kinds of cops who worked in juvenile detention, but he felt sure they ought to be nice. Nicer than the regular cops who patrolled the Southside and occasionally tussled with one or the other of his parents. This turned out not to be the case. 

“Think it’s funny to set fire to the school, do you?” growled the one who pushed Jughead roughly into a cell and slammed the door behind him. “Southside trash, just like your folks. Enjoy your night in here. You deserve it.” 

For the second time that very day, Jughead was sure that he did not.

  
  
  
  


When he was twelve, his mother split for Toledo. This might have been bearable, except that she took Jellybean. 

“Go ahead and get used to being alone. You deserve it,” she yelled, as she peeled out of Sunnyside with a screaming Jellybean in the back. It was nine in the morning. 

FP raised a beer—his fourth of the morning—in a salute to the back of the departing car. 

“I don’t,” Jughead muttered, not quite far enough under his breath. 

“She meant me, boy.” 

Jughead was not so sure. 

His father clapped him on the shoulder. “She’ll be back before too long. Don’t worry about it. It’ll just be us men for a while, that’s all.” 

Jughead was not so sure about this, either. 

“You want a beer?” 

Jughead was sure that he did not. He tried to drink one anyway. The bitterness of it made him gag.

  
  
  
  


When he was sixteen: “You deserve it,” as Tall Boy’s brass knuckles collided with his skull, and Jughead hoped he did. He wanted to deserve this: to be a Serpent, like his dad. He wanted to deserve to belong somewhere. 

Even if somewhere was a gang.

  
  
  
  


When he was seventeen: “You deserve it,” as Penny Peabody flayed his bicep and left him bleeding, alone, in the woods.

  
  
  
  


And now, when he was twenty-six, he heard _you deserve it_ and all the air rushed out of his lungs. 

“Jug? Is something wrong?” Betty pushed back out of his lap, her brow wrinkled in concern. 

He tried to take a deep breath before responding, and failed miserably; he could barely capture enough air to speak. “You know you deserved to have a good weekend too, right?”

“No, I know,” she said. “But it’s fine. I’m fine. But—thank you, Jug, for saying that.”

Was it better to just blurt out something random, to try and change the subject? He would never know that, because he thought—he _thought_ —that he _knew_. And as much as he understood Betty’s reticence to find her soulmate, everything in him now demanded to know if there was even the slightest chance that she thought maybe, just maybe, she already had. 

“Can I ask you something?”

Instead of answering verbally, Betty swung a leg over his hips and settled herself in his lap. 

“Betty?” 

She kissed him.

  
  
  
  


Jughead had kissed only a handful of people in his lifetime. With the possible exception of Archie, he’d never been too impressed with the experience. This, though—this was more than impressive. Kissing Betty felt like everything he’d never known he wanted. Kissing Betty felt like every tormented, tortured metaphor his mind had ever invented bursting onto a page at once, but edited into impeccably precise prose. 

He would have been content to prolong the kiss indefinitely—his only regret was that his first kiss with Betty had been on his _couch_ , of all the quotidian places—but when he felt Betty back off slightly, he waited only a fraction of a second before allowing their lips to part. Their heartbeats were in sync again, and he knew, somehow, that Betty had noticed it too. 

Before Jughead opened his eyes, he thought a single word: _Soulmate?_

But why would his mind phrase that as a question? 

His eyes flitted open, and he found Betty studying his face as though she would later need to describe him to a police sketch artist. 

_Soulmate?_

No, he told himself. It shouldn’t be a question. He didn’t _want_ it to be a question. And yet… 

And yet, he still didn’t _know_. 

Betty took a deep breath, clearly bracing herself for the worst. “What were you going to ask me before?” 

He couldn’t answer. Or… he shouldn’t. He knew she did not want him to ask that question. 

Still, she’d come to him. She’d kissed him. She’d kissed him rather passionately. 

He thought about Mary Andrews, professing to be happy that her soulmate had finally allowed himself to be with his own. She _was_ genuinely happy for Fred; Jughead believed that. He believed, too, that Mary had genuinely never believed that she and Fred would get back together. But several times in the last week, he’d come home to find Mary leaning over the railing of her upstairs balcony, staring into space with a glass of rosé in one hand and sadness in her eyes. Sometimes, before he dozed off at night, he thought he heard her weeping. 

Did Betty really plan to sacrifice her own potential happiness? Did _he_?

“I was going to ask what you plan to do if you accidentally find that soulmate of yours.” He did not wait for her to answer before plunging on. “What exactly are you afraid is going to happen if you just… let go?” 

“Anything,” she said. “Anything and everything. You know what my family’s like.” 

“No, I don’t. I haven’t met them. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure you’re nothing like them.” 

“Well, I can’t take that risk. What if my urges turn dark, like my father’s?” 

“You have a moral compass that he seems to lack,” he said. “You’d fight off the darkest urges.” 

“Even if I did manage to do that,” Betty countered, “how would it be fair to bring someone else into my—my mess? I mean, the one advantage to my sister’s soulmate being our first cousin is that this is all technically his family too.” 

By now, she’d scooted clear to the other end of the couch, seemingly unaware that she had done so. Jughead scowled in frustration. He was not directing the scowl at Betty, or at least directing his scowl at Betty wasn’t his intention, but she seemed to take it as such. For half a second, she shrank into herself. Then she bloomed brighter, sitting bolt upright as her cheeks flushed a defiant pink. It was beautiful, her spine of steel, and Jughead’s entire body ached to kiss her again.

Instead, he decided it might be time to unleash a few of his own demons. 

“You know I have a shitty family, right? Alcoholic gang leader dad? Drug kingpin mom who abandoned me?”

“Jug—” 

“I don’t get the impression you judge me for that. So why should I—why should anyone—judge you for _your_ family?” 

“That’s different,” she said, with far too much conviction. 

“How? If my mom’s not a would-be murderer, it’s only in that she hasn’t personally pulled any triggers. She has people to do that for her.” 

“It’s different because you’re a good person.” 

Jughead raised an eyebrow. “You think you’re not?” 

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, yes. I _think_ I am. I try to be. And if underneath it all I’m not, I don’t want to know for sure.” 

“Betty—”

“Besides, what if it’s not just my dad who’s the problem? What if it’s my mom? What if my soulmate has urges to do something terrible to protect me?” She sighed, tilting her head so far back that all he could see was her chin. When she straightened up again, fresh tears spilled from her eyes. 

All he wanted to do was lean forward and take her hands in his. But he did no such thing. He stayed exactly where he was. 

“I like you too much to want that for you,” she concluded, sad but determined. “You deserve more.” 

And with those words of rejection, Jughead’s heart soared. Because if Betty explicitly did not want him to be her soulmate, that meant she had at least considered the possibility that he might be. 

But then… it also meant that she didn’t _know_ , either. Of that, Jughead was sure. If Betty thought there was a chance in hell that he was her soulmate, then she wouldn’t have shown up here or kissed him. He couldn’t figure out which was more likely. All he knew was that his brain was throbbing. 

Suddenly, he was struck with the most Archie-like urge he had ever felt. Should he follow it? His logical brain said no. 

On the other hand, Archie had found _his_ soulmate. For real this time. Probably. 

Before he could think about it any further, Jughead pulled his shirt overhead. 

“Look,” he said, turning his left bicep—the one that still bore a Southside Serpents tattoo—in Betty’s direction. “It was my parents’ gang, but I was involved too, for a while. This is my second tattoo. The first one—” He showed her the scars on his right bicep, faint red lines edging a square of tight, shiny skin. “It was sliced off as part of a fight over who was going to run things while my dad was in jail. I haven’t always been a saint.” 

Betty seemed to take this bit of information about as well as could be expected, which in this case meant she looked more than a little nauseated. “How come you never told me before?” 

“It didn’t come up, I guess.” He scratched lightly at the shiny skin. It had itched like the devil as it healed, and whenever Jughead thought consciously about the events that had led to his arm being flayed, the itch returned. “I’m not proud of everything I did back then, but I had reasons that made sense to me at the time.” 

“Were you ever violent? Did you ever hurt anyone?” 

Jughead swallowed. “Yeah. I mean—I never came close to trying to kill anyone. I never could have done that. But my hands aren’t entirely clean.” 

She did not ask for more details. Instead, she asked, “Would you do those things again?” 

“No.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t today. If you put me back in the exact same situation when I was eighteen… I don’t know. I might.” 

Betty crept slightly closer to him. “Can I look?” 

He nodded, offering her the left arm. But she took the right instead, running her fingers over the scar rather than the green two-headed snake. Her touch made the itching stop completely, and Jughead tried not to think about that. 

If they were soulmates, Betty would understand the situations he had been in. She would have to at least try. 

Instead, she stood up. Jughead stood up too, at first consciously rubbing his left thumb over his forefinger so that he wouldn’t be tempted to scratch his suddenly-inflamed scar. Then he more sensibly grabbed his t-shirt from the couch and pulled it back on. 

“It’s over, Betts,” he said, as he tugged the hem into place. “All of that. I swear to you.” 

“I believe you,” she said quietly. “It’s just—I didn’t expect—” She sighed, a deep sigh, the world-weariest sigh Jughead had ever heard. He could practically see the gears in her brain churning, sputtering, grinding to a halt. “I’m so _tired_.” 

Tired of what, she did not say. 

Jughead glanced at the nearest clock. The fact that it wasn’t even noon yet seemed not just unlikely, but impossible. 

“Do you want to get lunch?” he ventured. 

Betty shook her head. “I think I just need to go home and take a nap, if that’s okay with you.” 

Jughead nodded. “Of course,” he told her. What else could he say or do? 

She left without asking a question that nevertheless lingered in the air long after her departure, long after her indefinable good scent had dissipated. What _were_ they to each other? And what did they want to be? Or, more precisely, what did Betty want them to be? Because Jughead knew exactly what _he_ wanted. 

He wanted to be Betty’s soulmate.

  
  
  
  


He wanted to be Betty’s soulmate, but what he got—for the time being, at least—was a return to their previous status quo. Betty came to Ninia about every other day for a vanilla latte or an herbal tea, her usual ridiculous quantity of study materials in tow. If it was a strawberry jam tart day, she’d have one; if not, she tried something else from the pastry case. She always sat at the same table, and Jughead wondered if she had figured out that he had begun keeping a little “reserved” sign on it until right before the time she tended to show up. Probably not, he concluded. He had the feeling she would have scolded him if she knew. 

Some days she was a little flirty when she ordered; other days she wasn’t. He couldn’t detect any sort of pattern. All he could do was roll with it, even as the sight of her inevitably caused the whole front of his body to collapse into a Betty-sized and Betty-shaped crater. 

She stopped texting him, so he stopped texting her. 

Several times, when things were quiet in the shop, they would accidentally catch each other’s eyes. At these times, Betty’s face, which was always so expressive, would turn near-indecipherable. If Jughead had to put money down, he would’ve guessed that part of Betty wanted to apologize for changing things between them by kissing him, but a bigger part of her refused to do so. But he’d never been much of a betting man. 

Perhaps it was perverse of him, but he found that he _loved_ Betty’s refusal to apologize.

  
  
  
  


He wanted to be Betty’s soulmate. He also wanted to have as little to do with Veronica’s boutique as he could get away with. 

Archie pleaded with him every day for two weeks.

“C’mon, Jug. It’ll be fun, and different,” he said, over and over. “And I really do think it’ll be good publicity for Ninia.” 

“Undoubtedly, Archiekins.” Despite still officially living in New York, Veronica was spending most of her time in Chicago now, and despite the fancy hotel room she continued to keep downtown, she seemed to have more or less moved into their apartment. “Jughead, I know you’re very committed to your hipster aesthetic—”

“I’m not a hipster.” 

“—but trust me, one look at you after my style team and I are through, and Ms. Elizabeth Cooper won’t know what hit her.” 

“ _Style team_?” 

He didn’t even want to know what Veronica thought was happening between him and Betty. 

They had the argument over modeling fourteen times. On the fifteenth day, Jughead gave in. On the sixteenth day, he found himself in the renovated Monica Posh store, looking longingly at his coffee shop through the new interior doorway that now connected the two spaces. 

The fact that he’d finally agreed to become a model, of all things, was not so much about Betty and the business, he concluded. It was the simple fact that in the deepest, darkest recesses of his soul, he liked having been asked to participate. He really did long to be included. 

And now, he realized, looking at himself in the mirror—now that Veronica and her style team were done with him, he was really going to long for a suit that cost more than the monthly rent on his shop. 

As a lifelong conscientious objector to all occasions requiring suits, Jughead had rarely put one on; when he had, the suits were inevitably cheap and ill-fitting. But this one? 

Sweet Pea actually wolf-whistled when Jughead stepped out from behind the curtain of the makeshift dressing room. “Looking sharp, boss.” 

“Shut up,” Jughead muttered, half irritably. This earned him a roguish grin from his employee. 

“That’s it! That’s the look.” Sweet Pea, improbably clad in a chunky cable-knit sweater with suede elbow patches and a pair of pleated, plaid wool trousers, gave Jughead two thumbs up. “Moody. Disaffected.” 

“Like a tortured artist, but a rich one,” contributed Fangs, who’d somehow been put in clothes that looked exactly like what he normally wore, but expensive. Even though he liked the suit, Jughead didn’t _want_ to like the suit, and so found himself envying Fangs quite a bit. 

“Keep this up,” Jughead warned them, “and I’ll fire you.” 

Archie’s head popped around the corner of his own dressing room stall. “No, you won’t.” He craned his neck in the other direction. “Ronnie? Are you sure this is what you want me to wear?” 

“One hundred percent,” Veronica called from across the room, where she was consulting with the photographer. “It’s marvelous.” 

Blushing almost redder than his hair, Archie stepped out from behind his curtain clad only in a pair of tiny, skin-tight briefs. 

“Okay,” he said, obviously uncertain as to what he was supposed to do with his hands, and more uncomfortable about this than he was over being basically naked in front of so many people. “But only because I love you.” 

Jughead happened to be looking at Veronica when Archie said this. For a moment, he could have sworn that Veronica’s grin faltered. He swung his glance back to Archie, and saw that Archie’s demeanor had changed as well. 

But just then, the front door opened, another man walked through, and everything changed.

  
  
  
  


When he thought about it later, which he had lots of time to do, Jughead realized he’d never seen soulmates meet before. Not in real life, anyway. Not in person. In the movies and on TV, sure. “Accidentally captured soulmate meetings” was a whole YouTube genre, one he’d occasionally perused in the angstier days of his youth. But in person, it was different. 

“Hello,” said the man who’d just entered Monica Posh. 

At first glance, he was unremarkable to Jughead’s eye: tallish, sandy brown hair, very fit, and good-looking in a preppy sort of way. This was how one might describe him in a novel. His entrance was equally unremarkable, in that the _hello_ was a general one. 

“I’m Kevin Keller,” he continued, still not really speaking to anyone in particular. “I’m looking for Veronica Lodge? I’m—” 

“Betty’s roommate!” Veronica exclaimed, striding over on her five-inch heels. She ran an appreciative hand down Kevin’s arm. “Oh, aren’t you just as Betty described. Perfect. Thanks _so_ much, I—” 

Veronica seemed to detect the change in Kevin at the same time Jughead did. What that change was, Jughead couldn’t say. He only knew that Kevin’s eyes had drifted to the other side of the store, and when they did—when they landed on Sweet Pea and Fangs, who were horsing around in front of the makeup chairs—he suddenly seemed to emit an invisible but nevertheless distinct golden glow. 

“Oh, my god,” said Kevin Keller. 

“Oh, my god,” said Veronica. 

There was a rush, and a whoosh, and suddenly Fangs was toe-to-toe with Kevin, and _he_ was emitting an invisible yet golden glow, too. 

Time seemed to still as the two men looked into each other’s eyes. Then, as one, they broke into enormous grins. 

“You,” they said, in unison, before pulling each other into a kiss so intense Jughead could neither stand to look in their direction nor tear his eyes away from the scene. 

They were soulmates. They _knew_. This was what it looked like, Jughead thought. This was how it was supposed to go. 

“Oh, _fucking hell_ ,” groaned Sweet Pea.

  
  
  
  


It was hard for Jughead to care very much about the absurdity of being asked to pose in a suit after watching a thing like that unfold right in front of him. Both carrying manic gleams in their eyes, Veronica and the photographer set about trying to rearrange their plans so that Kevin and Fangs could be in pictures together, even though they were wearing very different categories of outfits, and both men swore it didn’t matter. 

The mysterious glow had faded seconds after their first kiss ended. That was something of a relief… to Jughead, at least. 

“We have the rest of our lives to take pictures together,” Kevin said. He was now wearing a pair of swim trunks and an extremely tight t-shirt. “Just a couple of shots for posterity would be nice. And, you know, Instagram. But we can model however you had planned.” He peered through the open doorway. “So this is where my roommate spends all her time, huh? It’s quaint. Not to my taste, really, but I see why she—ooh, is there any chance I could get a tea?” 

(Fangs ran over at once, and although no one was supposed to be behind the counter when they were not on the clock, Jughead found that on this particular occasion, he didn’t much care about either the mild breach of labor laws or the fact that Kevin clearly had no intention of paying.) 

As he had his hair expertly shaped and sculpted, his undereye circles artfully concealed, and his limbs professionally arranged in a series of poses, Jughead distracted himself from the absurdity of this particular situation (and from the looks he was getting from the employees he had running the shop today, who kept sticking their heads through the doorway to spy on their photo shoot) by doing some mental arithmetic. He liked Fangs, and of course he liked Betty, but there was no transitive property thus requiring that he also like Kevin. 

On the lead stylist’s orders, he changed into a pair of jeans and a tweed sport coat, then a preppy pair of chinos and a plain button-down shirt, and finally—of all things—a set of satin pajamas. 

“Can we get a few with the top off?” the photographer asked, eyebrows raised in hope. 

“No,” Jughead growled, on principle. He thought he looked just fine with his shirt off, but that was very far from being the point. He wasn’t _Archie_. Shirtlessness was not his natural state of being. 

The photographer, the lead stylist, and Veronica herself all argued with him, but on this point, Jughead would not budge. 

“Let it go, Veronica,” Archie said in a low tone, and much to Jughead’s surprise, she did.

  
  
  
  


By the time he’d been released back into the wild, beanie jammed safely back on his head, Jughead had decided he did not like Kevin. There was nothing particularly wrong with the man, or at least, nothing Jughead could put his finger on. Kevin was simply a lot to take. Then again, perhaps everybody was on the day they met their soulmate. 

Though Veronica had flitted about Monica Posh in high spirits all day, those high spirits seemed to Jughead to be somewhat forced. Not that he was really paying too much attention to Veronica, or to Archie. He wasn’t thinking about Sweet Pea’s constant, loud, affectionate complaints about losing his best friend to some pretty boy from the right side of the tracks. No. He was thinking about Betty, as he so often did since the first day she’d walked through Ninia’s doors. 

He knew so many things about her now. He knew the difference between her strained smile and her genuine one. He knew the way her hair shone under natural, incandescent and fluorescent lights. He knew her favorite author, her favorite TV shows, her favorite bands. He knew the only thing that had ever made her feel truly stupid was a college lit class on poetry (“I’ve tried so hard, but I just don’t _get_ it—I guess my brain’s too literal”) and that if he ever needed someone to change his oil or pop on a spare tire, she was the gal for the job. 

He knew so many facts about Betty Cooper. Facts were just facts, though. Anyone could learn facts. He knew more about Betty than facts. 

He knew how to make her laugh. He knew how to divert her rockslides of sadness before they became avalanches. He knew when she needed someone to simply stand by her side and not say anything at all. 

He knew all those things. 

But he didn’t _know_. And if he didn’t know by now, then surely he never would.

  
  
  
  


The weather was pleasant, and so Jughead took his time going home. He wandered, and then he ate a lengthy solo dinner at a gastropub he happened to pass, and then he switched from wandering to meandering until at long last, he found himself back at the brownstone. 

Archie was in the living room, draped across the couch and two beers into a six-pack. “Oh, there you are,” he said, although it didn’t really sound as though he’d been wondering about Jughead’s whereabouts. “Want one?” 

“Sure,” Jughead replied. “Why not?” _Why not_ was that Archie had never graduated beyond the cheap stuff favored by college students. Jughead had long since moved on to favoring a local organic craft coffee stout on the rare occasions he indulged. He could still stomach this, though. He popped the top off a bottle and collapsed in their ancient armchair, then took a long, slow swig. 

The beer was sort of cold, and sort of bitter. This seemed apt. 

He knew Archie even better than he knew Betty, of course; sometimes Jughead thought that he knew Archie better than he knew himself. Archie, he thought wryly to himself, was much easier to read. And so he knew that despite Archie’s apparent nonchalance, he had in fact been waiting impatiently for Jughead to show up so that they could talk. 

“Everything go smoothly after I left?” 

Archie sat up, frowning. “After you left? Sure.” He frowned harder. “Jug, I know you haven’t found your soulmate yet, but—when you find that person, you’re going to love them. Right? Maybe not right away, but soon after.” 

Jughead raised an eyebrow. “Fate would seem to dictate that I should.” 

“Right,” Archie agreed. “That makes sense. If someone is your soulmate...” He trailed off, and Jughead realized that Archie was already, and somewhat improbably, tipsy. 

He didn’t want to ask, but he loved Archie like a brother, so he did. “Did something happen with Veronica?” 

The Harry Potter books sometimes referred to Ron Weasley having a “mulish” look. In his youth, Jughead had never quite gotten what this expression looked like. Maybe it was just too much of a Britishism for his unsophisticated trailer park self; maybe it was because he’d never encountered a real-life mule. Then one day in middle school, Archie had been complaining about one minor thing or another, and suddenly, Jughead got it. It wasn’t just the red hair, either. It was the red hair, and the jut of the chin, and the brow that was somehow open and furrowed at the same time. 

A few years later, Jughead realized Archie hadn’t gotten that expression from Ron Weasley at all; he’d gotten it from his mother. And it wasn’t even a good comparison, really. He could be dense at times, but his emotional range was much larger, much more complex, than a teaspoon. 

Archie looked plenty mulish now. He worried the neck of the beer bottle in his fingers as he gave Jughead an intense, stubborn stare. 

“A couple of days ago, I told her that I loved her,” he said. “It was the first time I said it. But I didn’t think twice, you know?” 

Jughead shrugged. A first declaration of love seemed like a non-event. They were soulmates, after all.

“Right.” Archie’s voice sounded downright pained. “But Veronica kind of freaked out a little. She said—well, she wouldn’t say it back. She says she can’t, yet.” 

Now it was Jughead’s turn to frown as he dimly recalled the moment before Kevin Keller walked through the Monica Posh doors: Archie’s line about wearing only underwear, Veronica’s slipping smile. “So this morning…” 

“It’s been _days_ , Jug. She says she’s still thinking about it. But we’re soulmates. She agrees on that. So how can she not love me?” 

“Of course she loves you,” Jughead said. It was an automatic reaction. Too automatic. Archie, in the midst of exchanging his empty second beer bottle for a full third, paused to send Jughead a halfhearted glare. 

“Then why can’t she say it?” he demanded, and Jughead was forced to admit he had absolutely no idea.

  
  
  
  


He nursed his lone beer through Archie’s third, as well as a couple of rounds of their latest video game, until they noticed Mary Andrews coming up the front steps and Archie decided he would go upstairs and talk to her about Veronica. Not that Jughead’s advice and companionship weren’t useful, Archie assured him. A clichéd platitude about sometimes just needing to talk to your mom hung in the air between them, unspoken; Archie never liked to seem as though he was rubbing their vastly different fortune in the mom department between them. 

It was fine, though. Jughead waved his friend upstairs, secure in the knowledge that even though she loved Archie more than anything in the world (which only made sense, after all), she would have been happy to listen to Jughead complain about girls. 

(Or maybe not. Mary had wanted to set Betty up with Archie, not with him.) 

Knowing it would be some time before Archie returned, Jughead permitted himself a long, hot shower that steamed the bathroom mirror so thoroughly he couldn’t even see his own face as he brushed his teeth after. He returned to his bedroom with his towel wrapped around his waist and was just about to trawl through his bureau for a clean pair of boxers when he noticed the garment bag laid across his bed. There was a note pinned to the front, written in a hand he did not recognize, but which could only be Veronica’s. 

_Please accept this as a token of my gratitude for helping out today,_ it started, and although “helping out today” seemed like an odd way to describe modeling, he decided not to question it too much before reading on. _We may not have gotten off on the best of feet, you and I, but you’re Archie’s brother and I’m Archie’s soulmate_ —Jughead scoured this part for any apparent hesitation in the handwriting, but could find none— _and so you and I will be important to each other in the long run, won’t we?_

Jughead didn’t finish reading. Inside the garment bag, as he somehow knew he would, he found the suit he’d worn that morning. 

He went back to Veronica’s note. 

_Archie says you get prickly about expensive gifts, so let me reassure you that all clothing was provided gratis from the atelier and not a dime has exchanged hands. This was meant for you, I think._

How much did Archie and Veronica talk about him, anyway, he wondered? Jughead rolled his eyes at nothing before swallowing thickly over Veronica’s last sentence. 

_You deserve it_.

  
  
  
  


Just after two in the morning, Jughead was woken from a relatively sound slumber by his phone. He rolled over and gave the screen a bleary-eyed look. 

Betty. 

_Shit_ , he thought, scrambling to answer. If anything had happened to her, _was_ happening to her— 

“Betty?” 

“Jughead,” she said, breathlessly. Even in the one word, his name, just seven letters, he could sense that whatever else was going on, Betty herself was okay. “Thank god you picked up. I’m sorry to wake you, I know you probably have to get up early, but—”

“What’s wrong?” 

“It’s Fangs,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “He got stabbed. I’m in the waiting room at UChicago.” 

“He got _stabbed_?” Maybe it was because he had only just woken up, but Jughead simply could not make the connection as to why Betty would know this—nor why they would be at UChicago, which was on the other side of the city. “What? Why are you there? Is he okay?” 

“Because of Kevin,” she said quickly. “He’s…I mean, they don’t have much to tell me yet, and I’m not even sure they would tell me anything since I don’t have any real connection to him—which, right, that’s why I called you. Do you know who Fangs’ emergency contact is?” 

“Not off the top of my head,” he said. Fangs’ hire paperwork was in the back room at Ninia, in a fireproof safe; it wouldn’t take long to find. He swung out of bed and tucked the phone between his chin and shoulder, already scanning the room for acceptably clean jeans. “But I can find out. I’ll grab the forms on my way down there.” 

“You don’t have to come,” Betty said. “Honestly. I’m fine.” 

“Are you there alone?” He would find the paperwork, and then he would call Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea would want to know. Maybe he should call Sweet Pea straight away, actually... 

“There are other people in the waiting room. The security guard’s been really nice—” 

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I’m coming, okay?” 

“Okay,” she said. He could practically hear her biting her lower lip. Then she let out a little breath that sounded, maybe, like relief. “Okay.”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for how long it's taken to finish this chapter, and to reply on all the comments to the last one. Life gets in the way, you know? As always, I'd love to know your thoughts when you have a moment.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO, FRIENDS. It's been an age. Did you know that working more-than-full-time AND having a non-computer life significantly cuts into fic-writing time? 
> 
> (Thanks to sullypants and village-skeptic, as ever.)

_Years ago now, couldn’t hold my eyes to the stars_  
_Burdened by how they slept so far away_  
_I see now this is better in so many ways_  
—PHOX, “Slow Motion”

  
  
  
  


Less than twenty-four hours after she kissed Jughead Jones, Betty Cooper came to two conclusions. 

The first was that regardless of how things shook out between them after this, she did not regret initiating the kiss. How could she? She didn’t want to say the kiss _awakened_ something in her; that would be ridiculous. But it reminded her of so much. Their kiss reminded her of thoughts and ideas she’d had in the past, before all the troubles with her family, back when the idea of finding her soulmate was merely annoying instead of downright terrifying. She had never been one to waste much time fantasizing about kisses, but in the moments that their lips were connected, the kiss was everything she’d ever hoped and dreamed a kiss might be. 

That Jughead then admitted to having a violent, troublesome past of his own solidified her second conclusion, which was that she would not kiss him again. 

She would have come to this second conclusion anyway. She was sure of that. She wasn’t holding Jughead’s past against him, or at least, she was going to try not to. Every shred of evidence she’d collected with her own eyes and ears told her that whatever Jughead might have done before, he was a good person now. 

_The best person_ , she thought, unbidden.

But no. It was too risky. She pushed the thought away.

The safest thing would be to never see Jughead again. She knew that. However, Betty could not bear the idea that fear might dictate her life. She metaphorically gritted her teeth, pushed up her sleeves, and went right back to Ninia. 

Besides, she had a lot of studying to do. She concentrated best at the table she’d come to think of as hers, the one that no one else ever seemed to choose. And, of course, the coffee there was _really_ good. 

She tried to act as though nothing had happened between them, even as part of her ached for it to happen again. Jughead often looked as though he had between one and one hundred questions he wanted to answer, but he followed her lead and did not ask any of them. His lips remained closed. 

(She was not supposed to be thinking about his lips.)

No. She was not aching for it to happen again, if for no other reason than that kissing didn’t just _happen_. And, though the kiss had been very, very nice, the thing for which Betty truly ached was something other than that.

Really, she just needed to get through her Principles and Practices of Engineering exams. Once she took those exams, once she had some reassurance that her career was solidly on track in the way she intended, then she could start thinking about other aspects of her life. 

That was...if she even wanted to think about those aspects after her exams. Maybe, just maybe, if she passed the exams and got the promotion that would inevitably follow—maybe then she would feel like re-examining her personal life. Or maybe she would not. A promotion might be just the thing to keep her focus on work and work alone.

  
  
  
  


Her plan would have worked just fine if Kevin hadn’t gone and gotten himself mixed up in God only knew what.

  
  
  
  


She didn’t have to wait long before Jughead came crashing through the waiting room doors, looking tired but alert. A slim sheaf of papers was tucked under one of his arms, and Betty nearly cringed; was _that_ Fangs’s hire paperwork, carried out of the coffee shop without even the aid of a file folder to keep it safe and organized? 

Still, she was glad to see Jughead, and not just because she suspected he had answers to at least some of her nagging questions, questions that she very much intended to ask. Along with the paper pile, his messy hair, mismatched layers, and sleep-crusted eyes, he’d brought the sense of deep calm that Betty so often felt emanating oddly from him. 

“I don’t know why I brought this in,” he said once he’d taken the seat next to her, apparently surprised to find himself carrying the papers. “Turns out Sweet Pea’s his emergency contact after all.” 

“Did you call him?” 

Jughead nodded. “He’s on his way.” He swallowed once. “What happened?” 

Blinking back tears that she thought must be about half fatigue and half concern, Betty stared up at the ceiling for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. Though she was in bed and half asleep when the hospital called, as soon as she heard the words _Kevin_ and _stabbing_ , she instantly became sharp as a tack. Crises always heightened Betty. Her reflexes quickened; her mind cleared. In the thick of a crisis, she knew exactly what to do. 

But then she’d arrived at the hospital and been informed that Kevin was already in surgery. There was no turning back. There was nothing she _could_ do. 

It was possible that—once she had called Jughead to inquire after Fangs’s friends and family—she had spiraled. Just a bit. 

She reached up to tighten her ponytail, and as her hands dropped back to her sides, she caught a glimpse of her right palm. It didn’t look great, and she assumed the left one matched. She flattened her hands against the sticky vinyl seat and slid them under her thighs as much as she could. 

“I barely know,” she said. “The cops and the hospital won’t tell me all that much. I’m Kevin’s emergency contact, but I don’t have power of attorney or anything. He just told them to call me.” 

“Wait. Kevin also got stabbed?” 

Betty shook her head. “No. Only Fangs. Multiple times, in the kidneys. Both kidneys. So Kevin—” Here, she found she couldn’t help but wince. “Kevin immediately volunteered to donate one to him. I didn’t even know you could make that kind of decision that fast, but they let him do it. They’d already started the surgery by the time I got here.” 

“That’s quite the Friday night.” 

For a moment, she stared at Jughead. There was something in his general demeanor that puzzled her. 

“You’re not surprised,” she said, perhaps more accusingly than she ought to have done. 

“That Kevin would donate a kidney to Fangs? Not really.” 

“But you’ve never met Kevin. Before today, I mean,” she added, remembering that they must have met during Veronica’s absurd Monica Posh Pour Homme photoshoot. Still, that wasn’t enough time for Jughead to form solid judgments about Kevin’s personality. “And he’d never met Fangs before this morning. Why on earth would you give a kidney to someone you’ve never met?” 

Jughead looked at her as though she was completely insane. 

“What?” she demanded.

He shook his head slightly. “Sorry. No one told you?” 

“Told me what?” 

As she asked the question, Betty felt the pit of her stomach sink as surely as if she’d just swallowed a stone. Somehow, she knew what the answer would be before Jughead gave it. 

“Fangs and Kevin are soulmates, Betty.”

  
  
  
  


She was still feeling dazed from the news that Kevin had found his soulmate when she and Jughead learned that the news was, in fact, more than that. 

A nurse called her into a private room; Jughead stood up, brows knitted in a silent question, and she nodded for him to follow. They sat down in different uncomfortable chairs than the ones they’d just vacated while the nurse muttered something about being back in a moment. 

The urge to dig her nails into her palms struck her again. This time, she did not give in. 

“Ms. Cooper?” The nurse had returned, holding a clear, heavy plastic drawstring bag full of belongings, which he now handed to Betty. “The transplant surgeon will be here in a few moments to fill you in, but for now, I can tell you that both Mr. Keller-Fogarty and Mr. Fogarty-Keller are out of surgery and doing well. The recovery period will be different for the donor and the recipient, but you’ll be able to—” 

“I’m sorry.” Betty turned her head sideways to Jughead, who also appeared somewhat startled, then back to the nurse. “Did you say ‘Mr. Keller-Fogarty’ and ‘Mr. Fogarty-Keller’?” 

“Yes, that’s right,” he confirmed, nodding. “This is Mr. Keller-Fogarty’s clothing. I’m afraid Mr. Fogarty-Keller’s clothing is now evidence in the police investigation.” 

“Police investigation,” Betty echoed. Of course there would be a police investigation. She closed her eyes briefly. Up popped the image of Kevin’s dad, a small-town sheriff whom she’d only met a couple of times, and whom she’d already called and woken up with the bad news. He was planning to fly into Chicago tomorrow morning. Betty opened her eyes, blinking in the harsh fluorescent hospital lighting. She ought to offer to pick up Sheriff Keller from the airport; she hadn’t done that before… 

The nurse soon left, and once they were alone, Betty immediately emptied the contents of the plastic bag onto the small table in front of them. Kevin’s boxers landed on top. Before she could even make a face at her roommate’s dirty underwear, she was distracted by the sound of something small but hard clattering across the linoleum tabletop. Jughead shot out a hand and trapped the item—or items, really, because when he turned his hand over, she saw not one, but two plain gold rings in his palm. They were unmistakably wedding bands. 

“Oh, my god,” Betty groaned, as Jughead rolled the rings around in his palm. He looked vaguely nauseated. Then he banged the rings onto the table and nudged Kevin’s boxers from the top of the pile. 

Underneath the boxers, they found both a marriage license and a marriage certificate. 

“I thought you had to wait twenty-four hours in Illinois,” Betty said, and Jughead shot her a slightly confused look. “I researched it when Polly and Jason first—well, it didn’t matter anyway. They weren’t eighteen yet, and they definitely didn’t have parental permission.”

Jughead nodded, then pulled out his phone and looked it up. “It’s not twenty-four hours, it’s just the next calendar day. So if they got the certificate before midnight…” 

“I guess they technically could’ve gotten married after midnight.” 

They were both still slumped in their chairs, trying to process what the hell Kevin and Fangs had been thinking, when the transplant surgeon came in.

  
  
  
  


The important thing was, assuming Fangs’s body didn’t reject Kevin’s kidney, both men seemed as though they would be fine. Betty hadn’t seen Fangs outside of Ninia, and wouldn’t have said she really knew him, but he’d always seemed nice enough. She certainly would never have wished these circumstances on him. 

“Jug, you can go home,” she murmured, nudging his calf with the toe of her sneaker. They’d moved back to the main waiting room, and he was more than half asleep in his chair, very nearly snoring. “I’m okay.” 

From across the aisle, Sweet Pea—who’d joined them not long after the transplant surgeon left—snorted. 

“What?” Betty didn’t mean to sound derisive, but found she didn’t particularly care that she had done so. She’d been here for hours. Outside, the sky was overcast, but nevertheless beginning to lighten. 

“You have any idea how loyal that guy is? I’m not insulting your boyfriend, Cooper. I’m complimenting him.” 

“He’s not my boyfriend.” Her protest was weak, and for a moment, she wasn’t sure if that was because she was so tired, or because, in her fatigue, she thought that she wouldn’t have minded having Jughead as a boyfriend. 

Sweet Pea snorted again, and this time, Jughead’s eyes opened. 

“I’m not going home,” he said stubbornly. “Archie can handle the store.”

  
  
  
  


Betty prided herself on not having turned out like her mother. Her mother would have welcomed as many houseguests as necessary in a time of crisis—in fact, she would have insisted that guests would be no trouble at all. Nevertheless, through a carefully orchestrated symphony of slight remarks and nuanced eyebrow raises, Alice would have made certain that every single one of those guests knew how gracious she was being, and exactly how determined she was not to mind the extent to which they imposed upon her household. 

But Betty had not turned out like her mother, or at least, not entirely. She insisted that Kevin’s dad stay with them, and though she still had very strong reservations about Kevin and Fangs’s whirlwind marriage, all Kevin had to do was make half a puppy-dog face before she insisted that of _course_ , Fangs should recuperate in their apartment as well. And she was determined not to make anyone feel as though they were unduly imposing. Kevin was her roommate, after all. Sheriff Keller was his family, and... well, now Fangs was his family too.

Her engineering licensing exams were in three weeks. Three weeks were all she had to endure. At night, she locked herself in her room, shoving earbuds deeper and deeper into her ear canals against the noise in the rest of the apartment, which was becoming more and more raucous every day as Fangs and Kevin regained strength. 

“In unexpected ways,” she complained _sotto voce_ to Veronica, who popped over one evening with gourmet chicken noodle soup. The two of them were now ladling into bowls in the kitchen, while the Fogarty-Kellers, or perhaps the Keller-Fogartys, continued their MGM retrospective in the living room. “I never thought I’d meet anyone who loves old musicals as much as Kevin, but…” 

Veronica laid a sympathetic hand on Betty’s forearm. “I imagine there are only so many times you can listen to _Seven Brides for Seven Brothers_ before it becomes entirely too much.” 

“One,” Betty said. “It’s one time. And that’s just the musicals. There’s also the RPG he somehow got Fangs into.” 

She sighed, and shook her head. The move sent her ponytail swishing. Her ponytail felt extra-heavy today. It seemed to drag against her scalp, sending dull aches through every single one of her hair follicles. All of a sudden, she remembered that she’d meant to get a haircut before Cheryl’s wedding. Maybe in the short week she’d have between the exams and her flight? The thought of adding something else to her list made her head ache all the more. 

“Anyway,” she continued, eventually, “it’s sweet of you to come check on the boys.” 

Veronica raised an eyebrow. “Sweet, nothing. I wanted to see the newlyweds for myself. They’re really…” She trailed off. A long, long pause ensued. 

“Really in love, I think,” Betty said quietly. 

It was true. Fangs and Kevin seemed made for each other, in very oddly specific ways that went beyond musicals and board games. Fangs knew not only when Kevin was thirsty, but also what Kevin wanted to drink. Kevin had taken one look at Fangs—not even shirtless—and known exactly where he needed trigger-point massage therapy. They both used the same very obscure organic high-end hair product, which Fangs described as his only vice and Kevin described as one of his _many_ vices. 

They weren’t allowed to have sex yet, because of their surgeries. Betty could only imagine what it would be like when they could, though. She was going to make the two of them pay for a hotel room for her when _that_ finally happened. 

She wasn’t turned on by the thought of either of their bodies (ripped though both of them were), or the thought of them having sex, either with one another or just in the abstract. But late at night, when she lay alone and awake on the other side of a flimsy wall, she sometimes had to admit that she was just the tiniest bit jealous. To give yourself to someone else, so freely and easily—to give yourself to that person, mind, body, and soul? 

The feeling that had overwhelmed her at her parents’ house over Labor Day weekend kept returning to her. Sometimes it creeped, or trickled, so that a tiny rivulet of longing seemed to work its way down her spine. Sometimes it hit her like a tidal wave. 

Sometimes, when she had it, she let herself think of Jughead. _Do I have the urge to go to him?_ she wondered. The answer was always a resounding no. 

She wanted to go to Jughead. She wanted to kiss him again, even as she remained determined not to do so. She wanted to sit on the couch and have him wrap his arms around her while she told him about her day. 

But that was just it: the feeling was a _want_. It was not a _need_. She and Jughead were not soulmates; there was absolutely no way they wouldn’t know by now. This knowledge should have been more of a relief than it was. Still, it was a relief of some sort. She could continue to follow her long-standing plans. She did not go to him. 

Veronica had come to her, though. Biting an aubergine-coated lip, she lifted her eyes to Betty’s. “How do you know when you’re in love?” 

Betty felt her brow furrow. “You don’t know? But you and Archie are—”

“Soulmates, yes. I’ve no doubt of that. But love?” Veronica shook her head. “That’s not the same thing.” 

For a moment, Betty rolled the concept around in her mind. “Sure,” she agreed. “That makes sense. I mean, I love my family. I love Kevin. None of them are my soulmates, and I’ve never thought they might be.” 

“Exactly,” Veronica said. The worry on her face deepened, even as Betty’s mind began grasping at the rough outlines of a question about non-romantic versus romantic forms of love. “B, can I confide in you?” 

Though for some reason the question felt like a ton of broken rocks cascading over her already-sagging suspension cables, Betty said, “Of course.” 

“My parents don’t love each other. Oh, they’d deny it—” Here Veronica held up a hand to halt an unspoken interruption. “They’re soulmates, utterly and certainly. But they’re not in love now, and I’m not sure if they ever were. They’re both in love with money, and power, and—and they love me, of course. They’re as simpatico as champagne and strawberries.” 

“What makes you think they don’t love each other, then?” 

Veronica looked helplessly at Betty, as though trying to psychically impart information she could not possibly put into words. 

“It’s obvious,” she said. “To me, if not to others. When we were in New York, Archiekins certainly seemed oblivious to it, which struck me as odd; I thought, given that his parents aren’t soulmates…well, I thought he might pick up on the opposite in mine. Instead he spent the entire weekend trying to impress Daddy with tales of his high school athletic prowess.” She shrugged, putting a sort of forced lightness into both her body language and her tone of voice. “Daddy was not impressed.”

  
  
  
  


Sheriff Keller stayed with them for only one week. That was good. Fangs seemed to have no intention of ever moving out. Betty put “have a talk about that” on her list of things to do… _after_ her exams. 

She stayed late at the office, as she’d been doing nearly every day since the Great Kidney Incident. 

“You missed a party,” Kevin told her when she finally returned to the apartment late that night. 

The smell of freshly roasted coffee instantly permeated Betty’s entire being, and she looked around. Fangs, who was strictly forbidden from lifting more than ten pounds for another few weeks, was perched on one of their kitchen bar stools, performing some sort of mad science-like experiment with a giant, fancy espresso machine that definitely had not been there when she left for work that morning. 

“Where’d that come from?” she wondered aloud, certain she already knew the answer. Her heart pulsed the tiniest bit faster, seeming to rise into her throat. 

“Archie and Veronica brought it by,” Fangs muttered, not looking up, and Betty’s heart plummeted back into place. 

“Fangs can’t work on his feet for at least seven more weeks,” Kevin said, “so he’s going to work from here.” 

A vein in Betty’s temple began throbbing, even as she recognized how _good_ it was that Fangs still definitely had a job. “How? You can’t possibly barista remotely.” Or could he? She had a sudden, horrible flash of a parade of hipsters tromping through their front door looking for coffee, and quickly shook her head. No, she thought; it couldn’t happen. There were food safety laws. 

“No, but he can do social media stuff. The espresso machine is for creating masterpieces to be posted on the latte art account.” 

“Might work on some new special drinks, too,” Fangs muttered, still deep in concentration. “I’m thinking elderberry syrup. I just gotta get my hands on some elderberries.” 

“Great,” Betty said flatly. “I’ll pick some up at the farmer’s market. Guys? Can we maybe talk about this living situation?” 

Kevin turned to her, but before he could open his mouth in what she knew was going to be a protest, Fangs stood up. “And voilà,” he announced. He too turned to Betty, holding out a latte with a perfect suspension bridge sketched in the foam. She could tell from the scent that it included her favorite housemade vanilla bean syrup. 

She didn’t want to ask, but she did anyway. “Was Jughead here?” 

“Nah,” said Fangs, shrugging. “He sent over some leftovers from the pastry case, if you want one. We saved you a couple.” 

“Archie said,” proclaimed Kevin—and Betty _knew_ he was trying to divert the conversation away from the one she wanted to have about their living situation— “that you hadn’t been coming in much lately.” He grinned at her. “I don’t think Archie is the one who’s really concerned about that, though.” 

Either Kevin and Fangs had not saved her a strawberry jam tart, or Jughead had not sent one in the first place. She contented herself with a giant sea salt snickerdoodle.

  
  
  
  


Of course, it was only a matter of time before Jughead _did_ show up at the apartment. She came home late one afternoon to find him and Fangs in the kitchen, deep in conversation over the espresso machine. So many half-full coffee cups littered the counters and table that she got a rush of caffeine-overdose anxiety just looking at them. 

“Hi,” she said, and both men straightened up—Jughead quickly, Fangs more slowly, with a wince. “What’s going on in here?” 

“Just stopped by to check on Fangs, and see what he’s been up to with the espresso machine,” Jughead told her. 

He wore his hat, of course, and a flannel shirt unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. In other words, he was wearing more or less the same outfit he always wore. For some reason, today, the familiarity of it made her ache. 

“Haven’t seen you around Ninia much lately,” he added, somewhat cautiously. 

“You want an elderberry latte?” Fangs asked. “They’re supposed to have health benefits. Fight colds and flus, that kind of thing.” 

“Too late for caffeine for me,” she replied. “I’ll be up all night.” 

Jughead’s brow furrowed slightly, and Betty tried not to sigh. She knew she looked like she _had_ been up all night, and not just last night, but the entire week. 

“Exams,” she said, by way of explanation. This was probably obvious. She was still carrying her enormous bags of prep material. “They’re in two weeks. I’ve been cramming.” 

Jughead nodded. “I should go. Let you—” 

“No,” Betty blurted out before she could think. “You don’t have to.” 

Both men raised their eyebrows. 

“Kevin’s not home to complain about carbs,” she said, adding a shrug that she hoped was innocent. “Let’s order deep dish.” 

“Yeah?” Jughead asked. 

“Yeah,” she said firmly. 

“Okay.” Jughead nodded, looking pleased. “As long as you’re not a vegetable-on-pizzas kind of person.” 

She was. “I could be talked into pepperoni only.” 

Jughead flashed her the tiniest of grins, and her heart fluttered.

“Hey,” Fangs said, sounding the tiniest bit hurt. “ _I_ like vegetables on pizza.” 

Without taking his eyes off Betty, Jughead shrugged. “You’re outvoted.” 

The pizza took an entire ninety minutes to arrive. While they waited for it, Jughead and Fangs cleaned up the espresso machine and Betty sampled the lattes. Fangs’s elderberry concoction made her gag; her gagging made Jughead snort with laughter. 

“Quiet, you,” she told him. 

He snorted again. “That was my reaction to it, too. Coffee shouldn’t be fruit-flavored.” 

“Oh, you only drink black sewage water,” Fangs snapped, causing Betty to startle; somehow, even though he’d been living in her apartment for over a week, tonight she kept forgetting he was there. 

Jughead, too, seemed startled by Fangs’s presence. He recovered quickly. “Right. Like you didn’t grow up on it too.” 

“I grew up on freaking store brand instant crystals. The difference between us, Jug, is that once I found the good stuff, I never looked back. And I still think the hipsters are going to love my elderberry lattes.” 

Jughead scowled, but said nothing. 

“Why not make them taste even worse?” Betty suggested. “Only offer them with oat milk or hemp milk or whatever the hot non-dairy milk alternative is right now.” 

The scowl on Jughead’s face quickly turned into an amused smile— which made Betty feel inordinately proud, considering even she didn’t think the idea was that funny.

“Ooh. House-made cashew milk!” 

“For the last time, Fangs, we _cannot_ afford—” 

“Just a suggestion, boss.” 

They had over-ordered, and so Betty wrapped up an entire half of a pizza for Jughead to take home with him. True to form, he didn’t even pretend he wasn’t excited by the prospect of leftovers. 

“It was good to see you,” she told him when she handed him the foil-wrapped bundle. “We should go back to hanging out more often.” 

“Yeah,” Jughead replied. His fingers fidgeted over the neat folded seam she’d made around the pizza crust. 

“Do you want a bag?” 

“No, it’s fine. I—” He took a deep, deep breath and held it for a moment. All at once, Betty’s insides twisted into knots. Too much dairy, probably. 

Without bothering to think about what she was doing, she stretched up to her tiptoes and planted a tiny, friendly kiss on Jughead’s cheek. 

He turned pale. Then he looked her straight in the eye. 

She felt just as she had after they’d kissed in his apartment: as though they were standing on the edge of some horrible precipice. One misstep, and they would plummet to their deaths. But they were not soulmates. Which way was safe to tread? Betty didn’t know, and she was sure Jughead didn’t know either. 

“Good night, Betty,” he said. 

“Good night,” she echoed. 

He left. 

Despite the caffeine, the dairy, and her little indiscretion, Betty slept better that night than she had since the day of Kevin and Fangs’s incident.

  
  
  
  


The next evening, after she left work, she went to Ninia to study. Jughead was not behind the counter. Her favorite table was occupied by a couple of teenage girls who kept throwing glances behind the counter, where Sweet Pea manned the espresso machine in a ridiculous denim jacket with cutoff sleeves. Although their cups seemed to be empty, the girls didn’t look like they had any intention of getting up any time soon. 

She left without ordering anything, went home, and stuck two leftover slices of deep dish in the microwave. As she was scraping her fork across the final bit of melted cheese still stuck to the plate, her mother called. 

Betty put down her fork, picked up her phone, and held it for an entire two rings, considering. At long last, she answered. 

“Hi, Mom,” she said, but the person that spoke was not Betty’s mother. It was her father, and while the tone of voice he used was perfectly calm and collected, it nevertheless sent a shiver down Betty’s spine. 

“Betty.” He paused, and she could hear him take measured breaths: one, two, three. “Why am I just now hearing that you are planning to attend your cousin Cheryl’s wedding?” 

“I don’t know, Dad.” 

He sighed. The sigh sounded measured, too. Calculated. “Well, although I’m disappointed you didn’t tell me yourself, I suppose that will have to be water under the bridge now.” 

Betty waited. 

“Your mother is devastated that she won’t be seeing your sister or the grandchildren any time soon. Now, I know you won’t want to take her as your plus-one...” 

Taking her mother as a date to her cousin’s wedding had never occurred to Betty. She flinched at the thought of such horrors now, hard enough to accidentally bite her tongue. The way her father had just trailed off left no doubt in her mind that he was waiting for her to volunteer to take Alice along, now that he’d brought it up. 

“That’s right,” Betty said firmly. “I don’t want to do that, and so I’m not going to do it.” 

Her father sighed again, this time deeply, and in a disappointing fashion. “No one is saying you have to.” 

“Right. I don’t. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about, Dad?”

“I assume Cheryl’s parents will be at the wedding?” 

“Oh, my _god_ , Dad.” Betty held the phone away from her face for a long moment, staring at the screen as her brain began to buzz unpleasantly. “You told me you weren’t going to go after Clifford again. You promised.” Did a promise mean anything? Coming from Hal, it probably did not, but a promise was all she had. 

“I’m just asking after my family, Betty. It’s an entirely innocent line of questioning.” He paused, and in the pause, Betty could practically hear her father rearranging his face into an empty, doughy pleasantness. “Now, where did you say this wedding was taking place?” 

“I didn’t,” she said firmly. “Good night, Dad.”

She knew her location services were turned off, but she checked anyway, just in case her parents had gotten hold of her phone when she had been home over Labor Day weekend—and then checked twice more before she went to bed that night.

  
  
  
  


At long last, the day of Betty’s exams arrived. By now, she had gone over the prep materials so many times that she thought they might be permanently imprinted on the insides of her eyelids. There was little else she could have done to prepare, she knew that. For the last week especially, she had done nothing but work and study. Was there such a thing as studying too much? 

No. No, there couldn’t be. 

After eight grueling hours, she left the testing site with a pounding headache. Otherwise, she felt pleasantly sated, her body diffused with the best kind of intellectual fatigue. At long last, she could move to the next item on her life’s to-do checklist. 

“Hey,” she said, when her phone call was answered. “What are you up to tomorrow?” 

On the other end of the line, Veronica squealed. “Is it over? Did you pass?” 

“I won’t know for a while,” Betty said. “I feel pretty good about it, though.” 

“Yay! I’m so happy for you, B. I know how hard you’ve been studying.” 

“Thanks. So, about tomorrow—” 

“Yes,” Veronica said at once. “Dinner? Drinks? Mani-pedis? Wait, I know. You need a body wrap and a deep-tissue massage.” 

“That sounds amazing,” Betty said. “All of it. But what I really need is to find a dress for my cousin’s wedding.” 

She heard another delighted squeal. “Veronica Lodge is on it. Meet me at Monica Posh at nine tomorrow morning.” 

“Monica Posh isn’t open yet, is it?” 

Betty was sure she wouldn’t, _couldn’t_ have missed an event as important as the boutique’s opening. She might not have known Veronica for long, but they’d become close enough friends for Betty to know these kinds of things; she also knew it would have been not just an event, but An Event. Not to mention that she walked by Monica Posh’s storefront every time she went to Ninia. She also would have noticed a _Now Open_ sign in the window. 

“Our grand opening is scheduled for November,” Veronica told her. “I have quite a bit of stock in already. A lot of it might not be to your taste, to be honest, but it’ll be a good place to start.”

  
  
  
  


Since Monica Posh was next door to Ninia, it seemed only fair that Betty should stop by for a coffee before she met Veronica. Though it was only the second weekend in October, the weather had turned rather cool of late—not that Betty had been spending much time outside. This morning, she decided, she would walk. In a fit of frustration over Kevin, Fangs, her father, and life in general, she’d torn apart her closet and completely reorganized it the week before. She plucked her newest early fall sweater (dark pink and blue tartan, nicely fitted, slightly cropped) from its designated spot, paired it with jeans and her favorite suede boots, and added a coordinating light jacket. For a moment, she considered leaving her hair down; then a gust of wind whipped a tree branch against her bedroom window, and she opted for her usual ponytail instead. 

For once, Kevin and Fangs were being completely, utterly quiet. Maybe that meant something was wrong. Maybe she should check on them. 

“No,” she told herself, speaking the word aloud. “That’s not your job.” 

As fall days went, this one was nearly perfect: some sun, but not too much; a brisk breeze that carried faint traces of damp leaves and roaring fires. It was a hot apple cider kind of day, and though she didn’t intend to drink hot apple cider, she thought she might float the idea to Jughead. Maybe if he didn’t want to do cider, he could add an apple tart to the seasonal pastries… 

She pushed open the doors of Ninia and stepped over the threshold. Her favorite table was open. She smiled. 

“Hey, Betty,” called Archie, from behind the counter. “Ronnie said she was meeting you this morning. I’ll have your latte in a minute.” 

“Thanks,” she replied. She looked around. The energy in the place was off, and for the briefest of moments, she couldn’t put her finger on why. Then it struck her. “Hey, where’s Jug?” He never took weekends _completely_ off. 

“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” Archie said. “He’s taking a few days to go see his dad. Or—our dads, I guess. He went home to see our dads.” Archie paused, clearly rolling the words around in his mind. “You know what? That sounds completely normal now. _Our dads_. I wonder if they’ll get married.” 

Betty’s throat felt slightly dry—the fall air, no doubt. She grabbed a cup of water from the self-service dispenser and waited for the arrivals of both her latte and her friend.

  
  
  
  


For the next week, all Betty did was go to work. _All_ she did was go to work. Having only one thing to do? Heavenly. 

She did stop by Ninia a couple of times, but Jughead wasn’t back yet. Sweet Pea shrugged when she asked after him, and said, “You’ve got his number, don’t you? Ask him yourself.” 

Her usual table was taken, but the next one over was clear, so she sat there and snapped a picture of the pastry case from there. This she sent to Jughead with the simple caption _Miss you_. 

He did not respond. But then, he often took hours to respond to texts. He wasn’t glued to his phone like so many other people were; it was one of the things she liked about him. 

But there was still no response by the next morning, and for some reason, Betty felt as though a page had turned.

  
  
  
  


Less than a week later, Betty held a far-inferior airport Starbucks vanilla latte in one hand and her phone in the other while she waited for her plane. She’d been waiting for her plane for a long, long time now. Several hours, in fact. There was some sort of severe weather going on somewhere in the country; for once, that place was not Chicago. Nevertheless, Chicago was more than affected. The last planeful of passengers she’d seen disembark had been tired-eyed and oily-skinned, dull after three hours stuck on a Baltimore runway before they’d been allowed to take off. 

“Don’t knock on our doors when you get to the ski lodge,” Polly told her. “The kids will be asleep by then. We’re in rooms six and seven. I think you’ll be in eight? Maybe it’s nine. Not that it matters. We won’t be far apart. It’s a small lodge, very private, and Cheryl’s rented the whole thing for the weekend.” 

“I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys,” Betty said. It was the truth. No matter how weird Polly and her kids got, and no matter how much she would inevitably have at least one moment of desire to punch Jason in the face, they were still her family. So what if they wouldn’t appreciate the dress she’d picked out from the Monica Posh stockroom? They’d appreciate _her_ , and that was more important. 

“Just check in with the concierge, okay? We’ll do breakfast in the morning.”

“Sounds great.” She spun her hardshell carry-on idly by its handle. “I think we’re finally about to board, so I’m going to go, okay?” 

“Safe travels!” chirped Polly.

  
  
  
  


The only saving grace of the day—the _only_ saving grace of the day—was that since the entire country was affected by travel delays, Betty didn’t miss her connecting flight. She arrived in Albany several hours behind schedule and headed straight to the rental car counter, where she stood in line for far too long before finally being given the keys to a minivan. 

“I reserved an economy car,” she protested. “I don’t want a minivan.” 

The rental car clerk shrugged. “We’re out of economies,” she told Betty. “You can either have that minivan or a different minivan.” 

Trying not to glare at the woman (it wasn’t her fault, after all), Betty swiped the keys from the counter and headed for the parking lot. She was tired, hungry, and—now that she was outside, and walking what seemed an entire mile through a covered parking lot to find the minivan—absolutely freezing. 

Things got even worse once she was on the road. The minivan’s heat didn’t work very well, and wind whipped its sides so strongly that she needed to keep both hands on the wheel; the burger and fries she’d picked up from a drive-thru remained mostly uneaten as she concentrated hard on keeping herself on the road. As she crossed over the border into Vermont, tiny particles of ice and snow began to patter against her windshield. 

Her phone’s GPS told her she still had two hours of driving left. Bennington, where Cheryl now lived, was in southern Vermont, but the wedding was being held much further north, at a tiny, remote private ski resort. 

Trust her cousin to make her guests run a gauntlet just to get to the wedding. Cheryl _had_ always enjoyed making people prove their devotion to her. Driving up a desolate road in what seemed to be an impending unseasonal snowstorm was entirely on point. 

Thirty miles out from the lodge, Betty sighed. The unseasonal snowstorm was no longer impending. It had arrived. 

She turned on the minivan’s windshield wipers and hunched over the steering wheel, squinting hard as she peered through the windshield. 

At long, long last, Betty turned off a winding mountain road into a small parking lot. She hadn’t been quite sure what to expect from the resort, other than a certain degree of grandeur. What she saw was a fancily built but modestly sized building that looked as if it contained about a dozen rooms. More cars than that were in the parking lot, somehow, and she had to park the minivan off the pavement. 

“As long as the beds are comfortable,” she muttered to herself as she cut the minivan’s engine. 

Getting to the lodge’s front doors was a bit of a nightmare; the parking lot was simultaneously muddy and icy. By some miracle, she managed it without twisting an ankle. 

The doors were locked. She peered through the front window, looking for the concierge. Then she noticed a piece of paper taped to the counter: _Concierge is off duty. Cousin Betty, check your email for the entry code. Kisses._

It took three laps of the parking lot before Betty could coax enough phone reception to make her email load, but she finally managed to find and enter the door code. Inside, the lodge was toasty warm and smelled faintly of cherries and cinnamon. She could see a room key envelope on the front desk, also labeled “Cousin Betty.” She flipped the envelope open—Room 9 was written on one flap—and found a key card. 

The time was just past two o’clock in the morning. 

She was hungry. She was thirsty. Her whole body ached with the need to sleep. There were eighteen rooms in the ski lodge, and Room 9 was, it seemed, all at the end of the lone, long hallway.

At least she was no longer cold. In fact, she was sweating inside her coat by the time she reached Room 9 and slid her key card in the door. 

The light turned green, and she turned the door handle and pushed. 

The door opened only one inch. 

“What the hell?” Betty muttered. She tried a second time. Again, the door opened only one inch. It was catching on—on the _chain_. 

Just as the information that there was already someone in her room processed, that someone began fidgeting with the door chain. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow,” said a man’s voice, short and annoyed and somehow… familiar. 

“No, I was supposed to be here hours ago,” Betty replied automatically, as the door swung open. 

She saw a small, cozy room that held a lone, twin-sized bed. Clothes and books were strewn everywhere, making the room look like it had been hit by a plaid-and-pulp fiction tornado. Heat blasted from the registers so strongly she could hear as well as feel it; the temperature in the room must have been close to ninety degrees. She could see a window along the back wall, but it wasn’t open. 

And there, in the door frame—slick with sweat and wearing only a pair of worn blue boxers—was none other than Jughead Jones. 

For a moment, they just blinked at each other. Then, in unison, they both said “What are _you_ doing here?”

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with my entirely-too-long hiatuses. As always, I would love to know what you think, if you're so inclined 💜


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, thank yous are due to Sully and Skeptic. ❤️

_My body turns and yearns for a sleep that won’t ever come_  
_It’s never over_  
_My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder_  
—Jeff Buckley, “Grace”

  
  
  
  


On Jughead’s twenty-seventh birthday, Betty Cooper kissed him on the cheek. 

Betty didn’t know it was his birthday, of course. For a moment, as he hovered in her doorway with half a leftover pizza in hand, he thought he might tell her. He started to tell her, even though he rarely told anyone. He wasn’t even sure Veronica knew, and Veronica was coming over for their traditional movie night later. Actually, Veronica was probably there already. He hadn’t checked the time in a while, but he was pretty sure he was supposed to have been home an hour ago. 

For a moment, he considered inviting Betty to movie night, too. 

But then she kissed his cheek, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw what he could only describe as impending panic. 

“Good night, Betty,” he said, and he left before he did something they would both regret.

  
  
  
  


He couldn’t focus on the movie. Archie couldn’t seem to focus on the movie, either. The only person focused was Veronica, who had accepted Archie’s hand across her thigh but then sat stiff and still and upright, watching the film so closely that Jughead wondered if she thought there would be a quiz later. 

“Good night, Archie,” she said, over the tiny and illegible credits. “Good night, Jughead. Happy birthday.” 

In unison, he and Archie said, “You’re leaving?” 

“Afraid I must.” Veronica did not tell them why. She kissed Archie with a chaste affection, and then exited.

  
  
  
  


Several days passed. If Betty went to Ninia, she did so only when Jughead was not working. 

Veronica was there all the time, of course, since she was working hard to get Monica Posh ready for its opening. She flitted in and out, sometimes asking for Archie’s opinion even though her decision on the issue had clearly already been made, sometimes asking for an espresso, sometimes so deep in a phone conversation that she didn’t seem to realize which half of the building she was currently in. Sometimes she wore black rimmed glasses or had a gold pen tucked behind one ear; Jughead quickly came to loathe those times, because Archie had the Veronica-in-glasses equivalent of a sexy librarian fetish, and was far too easily distracted. 

Once Veronica planted a quick kiss on Archie’s cheek before she left, and Archie walked around for half the day with burgundy lipstick on his face before Sweet Pea finally pointed it out.

  
  
  
  


Jughead pressed his electric razor harder and harder into his skin, where it buzzed with its usual degree of effectiveness. Foggy as the bathroom mirror currently was, he could still see that no further stubble had been removed. He’d never been able to grow much of a beard, and so there wasn’t much to shave in the first place. His skin turned slightly pinker under the grind of the rotary blades, but for now, that was all. 

In the past week or so, he had tried scrubbing his face with his everyday washcloth and soap. He’d pilfered a squirt of Archie’s slightly fancier “facial wash,” the one with the grizzly bear on the label. He’d steamed his pores open—not intentionally, of course, but he did spend a lot of time leaning over hot liquids at the coffee shop. He’d steamed them open again today, turning the shower dial higher and higher until he felt almost lightheaded. 

Grinding the electric razor into his skin was the last normal step he could think of. When even that did not work, when he stood up after tapping all the little whiskery bits into the wastebasket and found that he could still feel the impression of Betty’s lips against his cheek, he groaned. 

Desperate times called for desperate measures. 

He pulled his damp towel tighter around his waist and took a deep breath. Never once in his life had Jughead sprung for a name-brand skin care product. Drug store generics—those were his speed. 

But then, he hadn’t sprung for this fancy “alpha-hydroxy exfoliant peel” either. Technically speaking, it belonged to Veronica. She’d simply left it in their apartment, next to Archie’s toothbrush. He didn’t think Veronica would mind if he borrowed just a little bit. 

Twenty minutes later, Jughead rinsed his face in the sink and patted it dry with a corner of his still-damp towel. 

His skin was glowing, but not in the way Fangs and Kevin’s skin seemed to glow when they first laid eyes on each other. No golden light streamed from Jughead’s pores, not even at the spot where Betty’s lips had landed. It was time to face the fact he’d known all along: he couldn’t _really_ feel her kiss, all these days later. He was simply imagining that he could. It was all a grand illusion.

  
  
  
  


Late that evening, he leapt up the stairs to Mary’s apartment two at a time and banged on the door. The knock was much louder than he had meant it to be, but this registered only in retrospect, long after it would have been appropriate to cringe or apologize. 

“Archie?” came her voice. 

“No. It’s Jughead.” 

He heard a shuffling of feet, and a moment later, a concerned Mary opened the door. 

“Jughead,” she said. “Is something wrong?” 

He found that he did not know how to answer. Instead, he said, “What did it feel like when you realized you weren’t Fred’s soulmate after all?”

Though clearly taken aback, Mary merely pursed her lips for a moment and took a step back. He understood. This was not polite conversation. Asking about failed soulmates was a social faux pas on par with asking about—god, he didn’t even know. Asking a woman if she was pregnant, maybe. But he had to ask Mary. He _had_ to. He had to know, and there was no one else he _could_ ask. 

“Well, Jug,” she sighed, “I suppose you’d better come in.”

  
  
  
  


“There isn’t an easy way to describe it,” she told him, once she’d made them both tea. 

Jughead did not want tea; he had never liked tea. Although he’d eaten dinner only an hour ago, he was suddenly, desperately ravenous. Still, he took the offered mug and clutched it tightly in his hands, letting it nearly scald him—until he remembered that Betty had once sat in his apartment doing the exact same thing with a cup of Pop’s infamous coffee. He put the mug back on its coaster after that. 

“Frustration?” Jughead suggested. Was that one of the five stages of grief? He couldn’t recall. “Anger? Denial?” 

Mary shook her head. “The knowledge that I wasn’t Fred’s soulmate after all hit me as suddenly and completely as the knowledge that he was mine. I don’t even know what triggered the knowledge. It…” She trailed off, contemplating the empty space on her left ring finger where her wedding band had once resided. “I confronted Fred about it right away, and of course he denied everything. I knew he loved me, and we both loved our life together, and we had Archie to consider, of course. So we both just pretended for a long time. Years, in fact.” 

“So Fred—” 

“It was a kindness.” Mary’s head whipped up, and she held Jughead’s gaze with a stubborn ferocity so reminiscent of Betty that his heart thumped hard against his ribs. “Fred has never been anything but kind to me.” 

Jughead, who had never once thought Fred capable of unkindness, nodded. 

“I think he would have pretended forever,” she said. “I was the one who ended it. I remember I woke up one morning and felt like I had to get away for a little while, to—to test whether or not we had a bond, I guess, or what kind of bond we had. So I just got in my car one morning and drove as far as I could manage, which turned out to be Chicago. And after a couple of days, I knew I couldn’t go back to my old life. I couldn’t see how big the lie was until I got some distance from it.” 

He could tell Mary did not want him to ask more questions, but questions were nevertheless practically clawing their way out of his throat now. The only solution he could think of was to stand and pace the living room, and even that wasn’t much of a solution; he had no idea what to do with his hands while he walked. 

There was a long, long silence, punctuated only by the soft thump-and-scuff of Jughead’s boots on the carpet. 

“But you _knew_ ,” he said at long last. “You didn’t doubt whether Fred was your soulmate or whether you weren’t his.” 

Mary’s sigh was long and deep. “Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third,” she said, and he was sure the invocation of his father was entirely intentional. “These are not rhetorical questions, are they?” 

All the words that had been fighting to come out of Jughead’s mouth plummeted back into the pit of his stomach, where they churned and roiled and made him hungrier than ever. 

“Thanks for the tea and sympathy, Mary,” he said. 

Mary merely raised her eyebrows.

  
  
  
  


He didn’t just get in his car and drive. First, he set the staff schedule for the next few days, making sure coverage was more than adequate. This was easy enough to do, since he’d been planning to leave for Toni’s wedding in a week anyway, and he had been planning to drive, because he’d flown exactly twice in his life and found that to be two times too many. 

“Of course you should take a few extra days off to see our dads,” said Archie the next morning, after Jughead announced his intentions over pans of warm cinnamon rolls. He spread the next spatula of icing quite emphatically. “God, Jug, I’ve been telling you to take time off forever.” 

“Right,” Jughead agreed. “Thanks, Arch.” 

He’d intended to at least stay and work the opening shift, but the moment Sweet Pea stepped through the doors, Archie shooed him away. He was on the road by seven, a duffle bag tossed casually in the backseat, the suit Veronica had given him laid carefully flat in the trunk. 

The Chicago skyline gradually disappeared from his rearview mirror. With every mile of distance, he felt—well, not lighter, exactly. But a little less burdened. 

Perhaps.

  
  
  
  


Halfway through Ohio, he called Fred’s house phone, which he supposed was now his dad’s house phone, too. Fred answered, pausing to consider after Jughead announced he was well on his way and would be there that evening. 

“For god’s sake, Jughead. It’s a twelve-hour trip, and that’s too much for one driver. Stop for the night.” 

“We’ll have the bed ready for you tonight, Jug,” called FP in the background. “You can make it in one.” 

“Don’t push yourself,” Fred advised. 

“I won’t,” Jughead assured him. “I promise I’ll stop if I need to.” He had no intention of stopping.

  
  
  
  


Two hours after the sun had melted into the horizon, Jughead rolled up at the entrance of Sunnyside Trailer Park and cut his engine. 

Sunnyside didn’t look much different than it had throughout his childhood. He knew there were significant changes, but they were hard to see; despite the distance he’d put between himself and this place, he was still too close to it. Progress was incremental, he supposed, if it was even progress. The sign had always been rusty. How was he supposed to tell if it was even rustier now, or if some rust had been removed? If the sign was rustier, then how much rustier was it? How was he supposed to distinguish between the discarded beer bottles of his youth and the discarded beer bottles of today? 

The old Jones trailer stood where it had always stood. First it had been Jughead’s grandfather’s, then his father’s. But, despite the fact that it was Jughead’s childhood home, it had never technically been his; now, it never would be. The new owners, whoever they were, had replaced some of FP’s junk with marginally different junk. They had not repaired the front step. They hadn’t even moved the garden gnome or painted over the peeling “Jones” on the mailbox. A few lots down stood the Topaz trailer. Jughead couldn’t help but still think of it as such, even though Thomas Topaz had passed away a few years ago and Toni, too, was now gone. In contrast to the Jones trailer, the Topaz home seemed abandoned. 

A passing group of teenagers stalked past his car, shooting him filthy _what are you doing here_ looks. He wanted to jump out of the car and scream something at them, though he didn’t know what. He’d _owned_ this trailer park not so long ago, not literally but metaphorically, swaggering around with the false bravado that he wore like confidence until it began to feel like a second skin. 

He caught one of the kids’ eyes, and felt the corner of his mouth twitch upright. 

What he’d wanted most of all when he was sixteen, though of course he hadn’t been able to articulate it at the time, he now had: a father who wasn’t a violent drunk. A piece of fancy paper with his name written in calligraphy, confirming him as a bachelor (of arts, and cum laude, even). A living space with four solid walls, decent heating, and as many beds as there were people living in it. 

Once he’d known this place as home. Maybe it still was. Despite that fancy paper, he felt as though he knew less now than he ever had. 

But one thing he did know was that whether or not he ever found a soulmate, he’d built a good life for himself. Surely, he told himself now—surely that ought to be enough. 

He turned the car back on, pulled out his phone, and called his dad. His dad and Fred, really. His dads? 

His dads. 

“We’re already at Pop’s, boy,” FP chuckled. “What’s taking you so long?”

  
  
  
  


The bed they’d made up for him was Archie’s. This room, too, looked the same as it had in his childhood—except that it did not. The same posters were still on the walls, but Archie’s old TV and video games had gone with him to college, and then to Chicago. They had been replaced with a stack of woodworking magazines. 

He stood at Archie’s bedroom window, which looked straight into an upstairs window in the house next door. He’d never really gotten to know that family, not even when he’d lived with Archie and Fred; he knew they had a daughter, but she was something like eight years older than him and Archie. The family used that room for guests, and so the curtains were almost always drawn closed. Tonight, however, they were open. He could see a small girl, maybe seven or eight years old, bouncing happily on the bed. Her blonde ponytail flew as she flopped on her stomach, rolled over, then stood up and leapt again. 

Vaguely, he thought he remembered coming home during a college break and being informed that the neighbors had had a grandchild. 

He closed Archie’s curtains, climbed into Archie’s bed, and fell at once into a solid and dreamless sleep.

  
  
  
  


He did not sleep nearly as well the next night, when he was woken at two in the morning by what he was _sure_ were the sounds of FP and Fred having very good sex.

  
  
  
  


For the next few days, Jughead followed the same routine. He woke when his body felt like waking, which was, much to his own annoyance, before the sun came up. He packed up his laptop and trekked to Pop’s, nursing a cup of coffee and a plate of hash browns until lunch, when he upgraded to a burger and fries. He wrote, or at least, he tried to. Sometimes the words came in a steady flow. Sometimes they dried up for hours on end. 

After lunch, he packed up his things again and spent the afternoon bumming around the house, doing the kind of minor repairs that two professional construction workers couldn’t be bothered to make to their own home. A couple of times, he walked down to the Bijou, but they weren’t showing anything worth paying to see. He kept up text conversations with Archie and Sweet Pea, both of whom assured him that the coffee shop was still open and doing good business. He should stop worrying, they said. 

There was a word for what he felt. He’d learned it in college. He couldn’t remember what it was now. 

“Sure is good to have you back, Jughead,” Pop Tate told him, and even though he knew Pop was as happy as anyone else that Jughead had made good and gotten out, the words still sent a pang of guilt, or regret, or _something_ through Jughead’s entire body. 

Each night, they sat down as a family for a home-cooked meal, or as close to a home-cooked meal as FP was able to come, which was a frozen store-bought lasagna. Sometimes Fred had a beer. FP did not. Jughead, unable to figure out whether or not he ought to feel weird about drinking in front of his father, chose to abstain even when the bizarro-world Norman Rockwell vibes threatened to overwhelm him completely. They talked at length, the three of them, and if either of Jughead’s dads noticed that Jughead said not one word about his life outside of work that did not have to do with Archie, they did not mention it. 

One afternoon, out of the blue, he received a text from Betty. It was a picture of his absence: the counter at Ninia, with no one behind it. _Miss you!_ she wrote. He could not bring himself to text back. His cheek had started burning again.

  
  
  
  


Archie’s mattress hadn’t been used regularly in almost a decade, but it still carried unmistakable traces of teenage boy pheromones. There wasn’t a smell; Jughead could simply feel the pheromones seeping into his skin. They didn’t make him feel like a teenage boy himself, thank God. They simply dredged up… something. 

Eventually, they dredged up that vocabulary word. _Unheimlich_. The word he’d been looking for was _unheimlich_. 

After Betty texted, Chicago no longer seemed hundreds of miles away. It seemed close—tangible, even. He imagined Mrs. O’Leary’s cow breathing down the back of his neck, her breath soft and hay-scented and oh-so-dangerous. He told himself he was being ridiculous, but made no concerted effort to stop himself from feeling as though he was being stalked by pyromaniac livestock.

  
  
  
  


Because he wasn’t expecting Toni to _really_ be available for much fun the day before her wedding, when the time finally came to go, he didn’t leave Riverdale with any particular sense of urgency. The drive was only five or six hours, in any case. He took a leisurely morning stroll through the woods, inhaled as much crisp fresh air as his lungs could hold, and met Fred and FP for a late lunch at Pop’s before he left. They bestowed hugs and well-wishes and then stood in Pop’s gravel parking lot, both waving as he pulled away. 

Even in the small glimpse afforded by the rearview mirror, Jughead could see FP sneak an arm across Fred’s back, and Fred nudge FP’s ribs in return. It was a move Jughead had seen FP use on his mother every so often, way back in the day. He knew FP’s hand was in Fred’s back pocket. 

He texted Archie about it when he stopped for gas an hour later. Archie’s only response was _Veronica says that’s adorable_.

  
  
  
  


He texted Toni when stopped for dinner at what his GPS told him was the last thing resembling a town until he got to the isolated ski lodge. _Hurry up and get here already_ , she responded. 

When he finally pulled into the ski lodge’s parking lot, she was sitting on a log at the edge where gravel met grass, wearing a cherry-red puffy parka, artfully ripped pants that might have once been jeans, and her usual impractical high-heeled boots. 

A wave of comfortable familiarity washed over Jughead. Unfortunately, it receded as soon as he parked his car. Toni came rushing over, squealing with glee, and threw her arms around his neck. 

“Juggie!” she cried, as though this was a name she had ever used before. “Look at this place. Isn’t it adorable?” Breaking their one-sided hug—she did not appear to have noticed that Jughead had not hugged her back—she grabbed his hand and dragged him towards the ski lodge. 

“What happened to you?” he blurted. 

Toni stopped, dropped his hand, and regarded him as though she were a cat and he some insect she was considering batting with her paw. “Happened? What do you mean?” 

For a start, Jughead was sure that never once in their lives had Toni _held his hand_ , not even at senior prom. They had agreed to be each other’s prom dates just so they wouldn’t be totally abandoned when every single other person they knew ran off for secret drunken hookups, and Jughead had a very strong flashback to prom now, because _then_ , Toni had said “Isn’t it adorable?” with a much different infliction. Then, she was sarcastic. Now? Now she was utterly sincere. 

And she was referring to a goddamn ski lodge. 

Jughead blinked and shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, because he wasn’t really in the mood to be on the receiving end of one of her scowls. “I just meant—” 

“Oh, my hair? Cher convinced me. Just for the wedding.” 

He would’ve said it looked nice, or something, but he honestly couldn’t see how Toni’s hair looked different now than it had ever looked. Maybe that was because it was eight o’clock, and therefore completely dark out. Maybe it was because he had just realized how tired he was. 

“Come on,” Toni said, picking up his hand once again. “It’s late. Cheryl’s in a milk bath, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to meet her.” 

She continued to chatter as she led him through the ski lodge’s small entryway. He took note of the decor, a sort of rich-people rustic. All the chairs were made of heavily carved logs; they were chairs to be looked at, not sat in. He took note of the wedding decorations that had been ostentatiously placed on top of those, which were somewhat fusty and Victorian, if the Victorians had been obsessed with cherry red. Against it, Toni’s parka had an unnerving camouflage effect. She seemed close to disappearing.

“ _Bon soir_ , Amelia,” Toni said to a college-age woman behind the front desk who looked to be the very epitome of the ski instructor stereotype. “Before you head home for the evening, Mr. Jones requires his room key.” 

He pulled out his wallet, prepared to hand over his credit card, but Toni waved him off. 

“All expenses paid, silly,” she said. “We booked the whole lodge for the weekend.” 

“Room number 10,” Amelia told him. She handed over his key card with a bright customer service smile. 

Toni smiled brightly too. She led Jughead down the hall, chattering away as though this was normal. As though she was an innately chatty person. Had she been body-snatched, he wondered? Was this wedding merely the final step in sealing her fate as a Stepford wife? Who the hell _was_ this Cheryl Blossom, and what had she done to his friend? 

As soon as Toni opened the door of room number 10, her smile fell away.

  
  
  
  


“Burst sewer line,” said Amelia, emerging damply from the ensuite bathroom, giant wrench in hand. “The good news is, I don’t think any other rooms have been affected. We definitely would have had complaints by now. I’ve shut off the water here, but it’ll be a day or two before it can dry out.” 

“Great,” said Jughead. Even if the room did manage to dry out before he left, it would still smell of raw sewage. “Please tell me there’s—” 

“Of course! Room 9 is still unoccupied. Hand me your card, and I’ll re-key it in a jiffy.” 

While they waited for Amelia to return, Jughead asked Toni who else would be attending the wedding. 

“Well, Cher’s estranged from her parents, like I am,” Toni started. “But she’s got a big family otherwise. Lots of second cousins and twice-removed aunts and all that. I can’t keep track of them all—it’s like they just come out of the woodwork. Her brother, his wife, and their kids, of course. A couple of colleagues from Bennington, and of course some of her friends from grad school, and—” 

“Who’s coming from your side?” 

Toni’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” 

He tried to remember the names of Toni’s community college buddies, or the other people who worked at her old tattoo parlor, and came up temporarily blank. He settled for high school acquaintances. “I don’t know. Old Serpent buddies?” 

“I put those days behind me.” Her frown deepened. “I thought you did, too.” 

The scar on his shoulder suddenly itched, and he had to fight off the urge to scratch it. “I _did_.” 

“Okay then.” Toni shrugged. “So with my grandfather gone, and my uncle remaining a raging homophobe who wouldn’t have come even if I’d invited him, that leaves you.” 

That he was to be the only friend or relative of Toni’s at her own wedding struck Jughead as impossibly sad. But before he could reassemble that feeling into words, Amelia returned, Amazonian and smiling, the key card held aloft.

“I’m back,” she said, unnecessarily. “Let’s get you settled in.” 

She opened the door, and all three of them took a step back. 

“Well,” Toni said, sounding more or less like her old self, “at least this one smells like pine air freshener.”

  
  
  
  


Room 9 was dry. It was also very, very hot. The entire ski lodge was pretty warm, but this room—this room was blazing. Within seconds of walking inside, all three of them were sweating. Toni removed her parka, but Jughead stuck it out with his sherpa for a full five minutes while Amelia tried valiantly to fix the thermostat. 

Unfortunately, her efforts proved unsuccessful. 

“I’ll just open the window,” she suggested. “It’s not ideal, but it should keep you comfortable until tomorrow, when we can get an HVAC guy out here.” 

“You can’t call one now?” Jughead demanded, and it was only when both Toni and Amelia cast incredulous looks upon him that he realized services in rural Vermont were not quite so available after hours as those in Chicago. It was cold outside, though; earlier, his phone had told him there was even a chance of snow overnight. “Okay. Fine. The window is fine.” 

But Amelia could not open the room’s lone window. Jughead couldn’t get it open, either. It had been painted shut. 

“I can wake everyone up and see if there’s a spare bed in one of the rooms,” Toni offered. “There isn’t, and Cher will kill me if Nana Blossom doesn’t get all her beauty sleep, but—” 

Jughead waved her off. “Don’t bother. If it gets too bad, I’ll go sit in the lobby or something.” 

Amelia brought him an extra ice bucket before she left for the night. She even filled it for him. Jughead appreciated the gesture, even though it made not one lick of difference. 

He took a very, very cold shower before emptying his duffle bag in what proved to be a fruitless attempt to find his toothbrush. 

“Damn it,” he muttered. He must have left it in Riverdale. For a moment, he considered searching the reception desk, but then he decided it wasn’t worth the effort of putting clothes on and getting himself sweaty again. He brushed his teeth using the corner of a washcloth, then threw all the covers from the bed and settled down on top of the bare fitted sheet. 

The summer he was fifteen, Jughead had run away from home. He’d spent both days and nights camped out in the projection booth of the town’s old drive-in movie theater, which certainly didn’t have air conditioning. He had survived that then, and he would survive this now. It would only be for one night. Twelve hours, at most. 

He could put up with this room for twelve hours.

  
  
  
  


He woke with a start. There was a knock—no, not a knock. Someone with a key was trying to open his door. The clock said it was just after two in the morning, but for some reason he forgot this as soon as he looked away, and checked the time again on his phone. 

The door caught on its chain again.

“I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow,” Jughead grumbled; his first conscious thought was that Amelia had one hell of a set of hospitality skills. He knew he should at least pull a shirt on before he let in the HVAC repair person, but at the moment, he was both too hot and too tired to care. He undid the chain and let the door fall open. 

“No, I was supposed to be here hours ago,” said Betty Cooper, but that could not be right. 

It was right. Betty Cooper stood in the doorway, fully bundled against the outside weather and laden with luggage. 

She blinked at him, and he blinked at her, and then they both said, “What are _you_ doing here?”

  
  
  
  


It took only a little bit of time, but a lot of exasperated arm-folding, to get to the bottom of the situation. The arm-folding mostly came from Toni and Cheryl, who emerged from their shared room wrapped in identical silk pajamas (Toni’s black piped with red, Cheryl’s red piped with black) and clearly displeased to have been disturbed. 

But the situation didn’t require a whole lot of untangling. Jughead was in the room that had been assigned to Betty, the key card for which Cheryl had encoded and left at the front desk for Betty to find sometime after Amelia’s departure. The room that was supposed to be his was uninhabitable. There was nowhere else in the ski lodge for either of them to go, and thanks to the snowstorm that had indeed arrived, there was no leaving the ski lodge, either. 

“We could always wake Polly and Jason and their brood,” Cheryl said. “I’m sure at least one set of twins would be thrilled to share a bed with Auntie Betty. Cypress and Persimmon have grown quite a bit, but Balsam and Evodia should be ideal, wouldn’t you think?” 

Betty leveled a capital-L Look at her cousin— _her cousin_ , who was about to _marry Toni Topaz_. “Cheryl, you know as well as I do that both Balsam and Evodia still wet the bed.” 

Cheryl merely shrugged. “Only a suggestion.” 

“You can have the room,” Jughead said. He was wearing a shirt and pants now, and he was miserable. “I can sleep in the lobby—” 

“Like a common hobo?” spat Cheryl. “You most certainly cannot.” 

“I’ll sleep in my car, then.” 

“Jug,” Toni said calmly, in her best _you’re being an idiot_ voice, “it’s below freezing out there.” 

He’d slept at the drive-in during below-freezing temperatures, too, but this didn’t seem like the time to remind her of that. 

“Like an even more common hobo?” Cheryl pursed her lips for a moment. “I think not. You’re both adults, and you somehow know each other already, it would seem. Antoinette, is this decrepit human scarecrow likely to assault my cousin in the middle of the night?” 

“Hardly,” said Toni. “Jug’s saving himself for his soulmate.” 

“Then it’s settled,” Cheryl told them both, ignoring Jughead’s glare. “The two of you will just have to deal. We’ll raise hell with the lodge owners in the morning, of course.” She strode off in bedroom slippers that were uncomfortably reminiscent of the ones Phyllis Dietrichsen wore in _Double Indemnity_. 

Before Toni followed her fiancée down the hall, she leaned over to Jughead. “Isn’t she sensational?” she whispered, nodding after Cheryl and her bouncing red waves. 

Jughead really hoped Toni did not require him to answer.

  
  
  
  


It was just after three-thirty when Betty stepped out of the ensuite bathroom, freshly scrubbed, with her damp hair wrapped in a towel. The only pajamas she had packed were the sort one might reasonably expect to be appropriate for a ski lodge in the middle of October, the kind that would have given her heat stroke if she wore them now. She was clad in one of Jughead’s clean t-shirts instead. It hung down past the tops of her thighs, so she wasn’t exactly indecent, but he could still see nearly all of her legs. He was trying not to look too closely at them, but they were so very nice to look at. 

“Are you sure you don’t want the bed?” he said again. 

“No,” Betty replied firmly. 

The two of them couldn’t possibly fit in the twin bed together, not unless they wanted to spend the entire night wrapped in each other’s arms. Jughead did very much want that, of course, but he did not want that _now_ , under these circumstances, circumstances in which he would undoubtedly combust from both heat and desire. 

“You won the coin toss fair and square, Jughead.” 

“We could go best two out of three.” 

Ignoring him, Betty lowered herself gracefully to the pile of blankets and pillows they’d arranged on the floor. It sort of made a mattress. She stretched out her long, bare legs. She scowled at her long, bare legs. Then she began applying lotion to them. 

There was absolutely no way he could put up with this for twelve hours. He lay back on the one pillow he hadn’t given to Betty, shut his eyes tight, and tried to project an air of—god, he didn’t even know what. 

“Jug?” she said, a few moments later. 

“Hmm?” 

“You can turn the bedside lamp out.” 

He did so without comment.

  
  
  
  


For a long time after Jughead turned off the lights, the room was silent, save for whips of wind against the window and rumbles from the overenthusiastic heater. Betty was awake, though. He could tell. But he kept his eyes closed and his breathing even until he drifted into something that resembled sleep. 

When he woke a few hours later, desperately in need of water, Betty was asleep facedown in the nest of blankets. His t-shirt had ridden halfway up her back. 

His fingers twitched. He walked to the ice bucket and got a drink as quietly as he could.

  
  
  
  


The next time Jughead was awoken, it was not politely by his dehydrated body, but rudely by a series of extremely loud raps at the door. He opened his eyes just enough to register sunlight peeking around the edges of the curtains, then closed his eyes again as the rapping continued. He heard Betty get up and walk to the door, and closed his eyes tighter, not wanting to expose himself to her exposed legs. 

“It’s the brides,” announced Cheryl’s voice, through the closed door.

“What do you want, Cheryl?” Betty sounded politer than Jughead would have; he was sure of that. He also knew Betty was not pleased with whatever was about to happen. 

“We require assistance. I’m told your roommate has some kitchen skills?” 

“Jughead? He can cook, yeah. Why—” 

“Open the door,” Cheryl demanded. 

Betty shook her head, even though Cheryl wouldn’t be able to see. “We’re not dressed.” 

“Are you naked, or just in pajamas? For goodness’ sake, Betty. You’re my cousin, I don’t share our dear siblings’ proclivity towards incest, and even if I did play for the hobo’s team, he wouldn’t be my type.” 

“People can want to be dressed for non-sexual reasons,” Betty groaned, but she did, in fact, open the door. 

Cheryl swooped into their room in full bird-mating status, waving the oversized sleeves of her red silk robe for what could only be theatrical effect. 

“There’s a crisis,” she announced. She strode over to the window and whipped the curtains open, revealing a blinding white light. “We’re completely snowed in.” 

“Oh, my god,” Betty said. “Does that mean the wedding—” 

“The wedding shouldn’t be affected,”said Toni, close on Cheryl’s heels. “The roads are supposed to be cleared by this afternoon. But it does mean there’s no one coming to open the café. We have forty-something hungry people here, and it’s going to be chaos if we let them all fend for themselves.” 

_And no one coming to fix the heat or the sewage room_ , Jughead thought, all too aware that he was grimacing. 

All three women—Cheryl, Toni, and Betty too—turned to Jughead. Cheryl and Toni looked as though they had already made up Jughead’s mind for him. 

“You don’t have to, Jug,” Betty said. “I’m sure everyone can sort themselves out.” 

He supposed that was true. He also supposed that he’d been a shitty long-distance friend to Toni lately, and trying to keep her wedding day from becoming a disaster was the very least he could do to make it up to her. 

“No, I’ll handle it,” he said, reaching for the undershirt he’d left crumpled on his nightstand. “I mean, I’m not a short-order cook, but I can...I don’t know. Bake muffins.” 

Cheryl gave him a crisp nod. “Under the circumstances, muffins are acceptable.” She paused, and then added, “Thank you, Jughead.” 

The brides exited, and Jughead was left alone with Betty. They exchanged a look, and then both turned away. Jughead pulled on his undershirt and began searching for pants; Betty collected several neatly folded items from her suitcase and headed for the bathroom. 

She was halfway there when she stopped, turned, and said, “Isn’t it weird that my cousin is soulmates with your childhood friend?” 

Jughead swallowed hard. 

“Especially considering that, you know. My roommate is soulmates with one of your employees, and my dad’s ex-lawyer is your best friend’s mother, and—” 

“Are you suggesting that Fate is drawing us together, Betty?” 

There was a long, long pause. 

“It could look that way,” she ventured, her voice hesitant. 

“Well, it’s not. You don’t have to worry. It’s all just a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences.” 

The wind howled, the heater hiccuped, and Betty said, “I’m not worried.” 

“I know you’re not,” he sighed. “If you thought for even half a second that you _knew_ , you wouldn’t have agreed to stay in a room with me.” _Or be half naked in front of me_ , his brain added, none too helpfully. 

“Right.” The word was an agreement, but Betty did not sound as though she entirely agreed. 

The heater made a weird noise. 

“I just—I guess I just wanted to clear the air.” 

At once, and without intending to, Jughead threw his hands up. “What air is there to clear, Betty?” he demanded. “We would both _know_ by now, and we don’t, so that’s that. We’re not soulmates. We’re just doomed to be in each other’s orbits forever.” 

“Why are you making that sound like a bad thing?” 

Jughead collapsed on the bed and stared at Betty, whose eyes were wide and whose posture was somehow demanding. 

“It’s good that we’re not soulmates,” she continued. “It means we can still be friends.” 

“No, it’s not, and no, it doesn’t.” 

“Why not? You can still find your soulmate, Jug, you have plenty of time—”

He could not _believe_ she was being this dense. 

“Because I’m in love with you!” he snapped, not caring that this admission caused her to visibly flinch. “That’s another thing we have in common now. I don’t want to find my soulmate either.”

“Jug—” 

“I don’t _know_ that you’re mine. After all this time, that can only mean you’re not. But that’s what I _want_. If we could choose our soulmates, Betty Cooper, I would choose you.” 

Though Jughead’s heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t see straight, he could nevertheless tell that Betty’s lower lip had begun to tremble. For the briefest of moments, he had the urge to walk back his admission. Under different circumstances—the circumstances in which he somehow avoided ever seeing her again—he wouldn’t have said anything to her at all. But no. She had not apologized for kissing him; he would not apologize for loving her. 

“I’m going to get dressed now,” she said. She hurried into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. 

Jughead got dressed and left the room as quickly as humanly possible. He was certain that on the other side of the bathroom door, Betty was crying. He might as well let her do it in peace.

  
  
  
  


The first thing he did, of course, was start multiple pots of coffee. 

The café’s kitchen was not laid out anything like the Ninia kitchen. He couldn’t find a goddamn thing at first. Maybe that was good, though. Searching the drawers for utensils, scouring the walk-in for ingredients—neither of these were ruminating on the tidal wave of feelings he had just unleashed on Betty. If he was in his own kitchen, he wouldn’t have to think about finding anything, and he’d probably be thinking more about his spectacularly ill-timed declaration of love. 

He found lots of eggs, lots of cream, lots of cheese, and some baby spinach that was edible but had definitely seen better days. Quiche, then, if he could find appropriate pans. 

But then, he wondered, as he dumped a bunch of flour into a food processor to make crust—was there such a thing as a good time to declare you were in love with a person who did not, _would_ not, love you back? 

Only the impassable roads and the fact that he’d driven his own car were keeping him here. If he could afford to abandon his car, he might well have stolen a pair of skis and headed out of the lodge that way. He didn’t know how to ski, had never once been on skis, but surely the pain of repeatedly falling down or running into trees wouldn’t be comparable to the pain he felt now. 

_You’re a grown man and she isn’t your soulmate_ , he told himself, as he plopped pats of butter into the food processor. _Grow up._

After his quiches were in the oven, he got to work on the promised muffins; the café menu boasted that blueberry pancakes were a specialty, and he’d found enough frozen blueberries to believe it. The muffins would not rival Ethel’s, but they’d at least be something. He texted Toni that breakfast would be ready in about twenty minutes. 

Then, finally, he allowed himself a cup of coffee. He was starving, so he grabbed a couple of slightly stale dinner rolls from a bag and chewed through them while he waited for the first of the oven timers to beep. 

The café’s pass-through window was unusually large; he had a clear view of almost the whole seating area. Some people had already entered, and with a sinking feeling, he realized they could only be Betty’s sister and her children—unless some other group at this wedding consisted of a blonde woman and four sets of strawberry blonde twins. He wondered if he should shout through to them that food wasn’t ready yet, but before he could, the kitchen doors swung open and the oldest twins entered. 

“Hello,” said the girl. “You must be Jughead. I’m Juniper, and this is my brother Dagwood. Aunt Cheryl sent us to assist you in the kitchens.” 

These kids were, what, twelve? Thirteen? A million applicable labor laws flashed through Jughead’s mind—but then, no one was exactly _working_ , were they? 

He would probably regret not accepting help. “Wash your hands,” he told the kids, “and you can start setting tables.” 

“May we begin by serving coffee to Mother?” asked Dagwood. 

The children were, at least, polite. “Just the mugs and spoons and stuff. No handling hot liquids.” 

Juniper shot him a look that was entirely too reminiscent of her Aunt Betty. “We’re children, Mr. Jones. We’re not inept.” 

By the time Juniper and Dagwood had finished washing their hands, Betty had appeared, and taken the seat next to her sister. A toddler crawled over her lap. Even from this distance, he could see that she was both extremely upset and extremely determined to hide her state of mind from everyone. Her sister seemed oblivious, but then, her sister was also supervising all those children. 

He sent Dagwood out with two mugs and the coffee pot. He intended to send Juniper out with quiche and muffins, once those came out of the oven. She was right. Twelve (or thirteen, or whatever they were) was old enough to know how to keep yourself from getting burned. 

He wished more people would come in. He could _hear_ Betty and her sister, though they spoke softly enough that he could not make out any words. This made sense. Betty knew where he was; she must not want him to hear. 

Just as what must have been every other person in the ski lodge flowed into the café, Betty’s sister said something to her; at the very same moment, the first oven timer beeped. _Thank god_ , he thought. A little chaos was exactly what he needed. 

Before he could get to the oven, Betty looked up. She met his gaze head-on. Her lips parted slightly, and her expression changed slowly from anguish to sheer panic to—

He heard a bang, and whatever spell he was under broke. Jughead turned quickly to see that with the oven timer still beeping, Juniper had taken it upon herself to remove the muffins from the oven. Her skinny arms were swathed in enormous oven mitts. 

“Where should I place these to cool?” she asked. “Oh, never mind. I see that you put out a rack already.” 

  
  
  
  


For more than an hour, Jughead sliced quiche and popped fresh muffins onto plates. Toni made a crack about how much his cooking had improved since that time in first grade that he’d practically burned down the Topaz trailer trying to make popcorn. Cheryl complimented him, and even managed to sound sincere. A man who could only be Cheryl’s brother (and, therefore, Betty’s brother-in-law) came to introduce himself, and talked Jughead’s ear off about absolutely nothing for over twenty minutes. 

Betty sat still at her table. She ate little and said less. She did not look back at the kitchens. When her sister’s family left, she followed, holding one hand from each four-year-old twin in each of her own. 

At long last, the café finished emptying out. Jughead rolled his sleeves up another turn and prepared to start in on the dishes. 

He heard the kitchen doors open. “Leftover muffins are by the oven,” he called, not bothering to look. 

“Jug,” said Betty’s voice. 

He turned, and there she was, nervous but otherwise poised. Her fingers drummed lightly on the thighs of her dark-wash skinny jeans. A blue and white sweater gently hugged her curves. Her ponytail was slightly askew, as though small children had helped re-style it at some point in the morning. 

She was as beautiful as ever. As always. 

“Betty.” 

Her eyes searched his—for what, he did not know. 

“I have a theory,” she said. 

Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, this was not it. He took a step back, balancing against the edge of the counter, and folded his arms across his chest. 

“A theory,” he echoed. 

“About all of the coincidences. About why we’re not—why we don’t—” She sighed. “It’s going to sound nuts, but can I run it by you?” 

He sighed. “Do I have a choice?” 

“No,” she said. “But I think you’ll want—I mean, if you meant what you said earlier—which you did. I know you did.” 

All he could do was wait, and watch, and try not to implode. 

“My sister said something to me this morning.” 

“Okay.” 

“Jason, her husband—he said he was surprised I still haven’t found my soulmate, and Polly said that didn’t surprise her at all. She said I’d _never_ wanted to find one, not even before she met Jason and our family blew up.” 

“Okay,” Jughead repeated, unable to see where this was going. 

“Jug, what if our soulmates—the way we meet them—what if that’s all specific to the individual people, in some way? I mean, of course it is, but what if it _really_ is? Like, Polly and Jason—she just wanted a boring Romeo and Juliet meeting, and Jason was a star athlete, so they locked eyes from across a room at some random high school party and that was that. Kevin and Fangs—well, Kevin’s always been really insecure about a lot of stuff, which he’d never admit, but I think all he ever wanted was a hot guy who would look at him like he’s the most gorgeous human on the planet. So of course he met his soulmate while they were both modeling.” 

Jughead’s tongue felt thick and heavy in his mouth now. 

“When we were kids, Polly used to love stupid romance novels,” Betty continued. “She checked tons of them out from the library. And I wanted to be like her, or I thought I did, so I read them too. And she’s right, Jug. I read all those novels, but I never liked them very much, because I hated the idea that Fate was going to choose someone for me.” 

“What are you getting at?” If she was telling him what he thought she was telling him… 

“And the first time I went into Ninia,” she said, suddenly almost shy, “the very first time, do you remember? I’d just gotten my period, and I didn’t have a tampon, so I just grabbed the restroom key and ran. And then on the way back, I passed by that framed review on the wall, the one that points out how attractive all of you are. But what I thought—no, I should back up. I’d never met Archie before, but I’d heard about him from Mary, and I’d seen his picture, and I always thought he seemed like he would be easy to like. And I saw _your_ picture, and you at the espresso bar, and I thought—” Here she blushed furiously. “I thought you seemed like you would make it more of a challenge to like you. And I thought I would accept that challenge.” 

“There were tampons in the bathroom.” 

“I know,” Betty said, nodding. “My exact favorite ones.” 

“We never had tampons in the bathroom before.” He felt dumb. Lightheaded. Dizzy. “I had the urge to buy them earlier that day.” 

“And then at Mary’s dinner, I had the urge for ice cream,” Betty continued. 

“But—no, Betty.” Jughead closed his eyes, and pushed the heels of both hands into them, kneading until he saw stars. He opened his eyes again, and now saw stars around Betty instead. “Look. I’ve had so many urges that have to do with you. You have no idea how many. But I don’t _know_. I’ve never known.” 

“I know, Jug,” she said. “And I think I know why. Don’t you get it? I never wanted Fate to choose someone for me; I wanted to choose for myself. I wanted someone to choose _me_. And you did.” 

“So what does that even mean?” he demanded. 

“It means we don’t _know_ because all Fate did was bring us together. Fate didn’t tell us we’re soulmates.” She stood directly in front of him now, and her voice was soft and gentle. “It means I have to choose you too.” 

The logic of this statement hit hard, like a cannonball crashing into the carefully built wall that was Jughead’s life. Just as he saw that life beginning to crumble into the sea, Betty spoke again.

“And I do, Jug. I think I have been from the very first day we met, when I accepted the challenge to like you.” One hand cupped each side of his jaw, and she pressed gently, tilting his face towards hers. “I’m scared out of my mind to admit it. But I want you as my soulmate. I do.” 

He was kissing her before he could form a conscious thought. His arms wrapped around Betty’s shoulders, pulling her close. Her body trembled slightly against him, but he could feel that she was smiling through her nervousness. More than that, he could sense that she was smiling. 

And, just like that, he _knew_.

“Betty,” he said, and it sounded like the whole world.

  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so y'all know, I _did_ consider ending this chapter on more of a cliffhanger. You're welcome. :p
> 
> (As always - I would love to know your thoughts, when you have the time!)

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a hot minute since I managed to write anything! It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a comment when you have the time. ❤️


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